The Killer in the Psychologist
by AmandaFriend
Summary: What if Sweets had to pull the trigger? What would happen to the mild-mannered shrink if he were to actually have to kill someone? This is a tale of how his actions affect Booth and Brennan as well as the others.
1. The shooting

_**The Killer in the Psychologist**_

_**Bones**_**, the TV show, belongs to others. Bones, the 206 calcium-rich items used for structural integrity within my own frame, are mine. **

**So's this story. **

**AN: **Maybe Booth is right, maybe a psychologist shouldn't carry a gun. Could you imagine a counseling session with a gun-toting shrink?

But maybe Brennan is right, too. Maybe he could draw off gunfire from Booth and prevent her from rearing their child alone.

Or maybe no one is really right.

oOo

He knew the symptoms well: a sense of dissociation, racing heartbeat, difficulty concentrating. When his hand went to his pocket to fish out his cell phone and call for the ambulance, the tremors were severe enough that he dropped the phone. Bending to pick it up, he could feel the backwash of bile in his throat as he saw the puddle of blood seem to grow around the three men. He reached out a tremulous hand to touch the one man, to gauge his breathing, his pulse.

The man lifted his head from the cradle of his arms and eyed him. "Call. . . ."

The man collapsed again—not like he had before, crumpling to the ground, first to one knee then convulsing as another bullet caught him in the shoulder, the images making a slow playback. Merely folded in on himself as if to cradle the pain coursing through his chest.

"Call," came the voice rough with pain muffled somewhat by the proximity of the ground, "make the damned call."

He bent to the order, his thumb turning on the phone automatically. Scanning the options with a glance, he made his selection, the one he had made sure was at the top of his speed dial numbers ever since he had been given a chance out in the field. He'd never really needed to use it before, certainly not for something like this before.

Not this.

"We need a Medivac unit at. . . ," he heard his voice strangely higher than normal, sounding almost strangled as if the words were caught and stretched to the straining point. He recited the address he'd read from the computer minutes earlier. "We have three men down. There's a lot a blood. So much blood." His throat dry, he swallowed and tried to sound more normal. But he could only squeak out, "I think one of them is dead. The others are in bad shape. Real bad shape."

The dispatcher's voice seemed both far away and entirely too close at the same time, even and robotic. "I'm sending the unit immediately. Can you tell me the nature of the injuries?"

He understood deep down that he knew the nature, the images assaulting his memory in slow motion detail. First, the flash of movement, then another and then the assault on his ears as the gun fired. Then the gun trained on him as fear held him in its grip. A grunt, another sharp report and another and another. . . .

"Shots," he sputtered. "Gunshots. . . he was hit twice. . . no, three times." The voice from the phone repeated a question, once, twice. . . .

"The officer's name?" He was staring at the man and for a millisecond, he couldn't even remember the man's name. Then suddenly he had it.

"Lance Sweets," he offered. It seemed right and wrong at the same time. "No. No. That's, that's me. No, that's my name." He took a deep breath and tried again. "It's Booth. FBI Agent Seeley Booth."

"He might be dead."


	2. Tuesday begins the end

**Tuesday, 9:57 a.m. **

The man sitting next to him could be soooo damned frustrating.

"I just think it might be good for you and Dr. Brennan to discuss some things in my office, Agent Booth."

Here came the frustrating part. That grin. The eternal optimist grin that only Agent Seeley Booth had perfected during the year since he and Dr. Brennan had finally burst that dam and became a couple in spectacular fashion.

Not just sex, mind you. Not just hot dates and hotter nights.

She had given birth to their daughter just two months ago. Booth was ecstatic.

And this was no frozen-sperm-unfrozen kind of thing either.

They were TOGETHER in a way they had never quite been together before, despite rumors, despite innuendo, despite just how damned close they might have seemed before Maluku and Afghanistan and books and brain scans and reporters and. . . .

That grin, which popped out and popped up to remind him of just how together they were after all that had happened just said it all.

Whenever he tried to ameliorate a conflict or offer advice, one or the other or usually both of them closed up saving the disagreement for them and them alone. Even a damned difference of opinion was theirs to deal with; they regularly refused his assistance. Never mind that he knew them so well. They answered his offers with silence or misdirection or Booth's self-assured, we've-got-it-covered grin.

The only saving grace was that that grin was just as annoying as his voice must be to the FBI agent. Booth had mentioned it more than once, the concern oozing out in a "misguided attempt"—Dr. Brennan's words, not his—_to save us from ourselves_. The last words were Booth's, delivered with a fair measure of sarcasm.

"We're fine, Sweets." That grin again. "We're fine."

"I'm just trying to help." He had made this same point dozens of times with little effect on the man. "I can offer some psychological insights, mediate any conflicts you two might have."

"We mediate just fine, Sweets."

On the surface, that might be true, thought the psychologist. On the surface Booth appeared happy, tired certainly with a two-month-old baby to test his sleep patterns, but generally in good spirits. But even with her recent plunge into motherhood, Dr. Brennan continued, to the casual observer, to be almost distant from her own life, commenting on it as if it were someone else's. Touched, but untouched by recent events. Whatever feelings lay just beneath the surface lay under an impenetrable layer.

Time for another tack, he thought.

"Have you scheduled the baptism yet?"

The tic around Booth's eye was minute, but to a trained observer, it screamed volumes. So did the slight tightening of his hands on the steering wheel and the new set of his jaw.

Hard question ninja'd shit-eating grin every time.

"So I take it, no."

Religion. Politics. Money. Status. Most couples knew those were the regular battlefields. But Booth and Brennan could find conflict in just about anything. Really. Name it and it seemed the bickering Bs were as just divided on it as North and South Korea.

After years of observation, he knew that letter of the alphabet very well indeed.

"We're meeting with the priest tomorrow."

Sweets studied the man. The tic was still there. "You're meeting with the priest without Dr. Brennan." He was guessing, but given how long he'd been studying the two of them, it was a good guess.

Booth's jaw seemed set in iron. "Bones and I are meeting with a priest tomorrow to discuss the baptism."

He'd been privy to enough of their discussions about religion to know that Dr. Brennan plus a priest was more than a bad joke waiting to happen.

"That should be interesting."

He could have said anything at that point and the tension in the car still would have ratcheted up. _Hey, that's great. _Tick. Tick. Tick. _Do you think that's a wise idea? _Tick. Tick. Tick. _Maybe you should take a sedative before you go? _Tick. Tick. Tick. _Bring one for the priest, too. _Tick. Tick. Tick.

"Why does it matter to you?"

He was used to this tactic as well. Just one of several tools in the B&B defense kit. Set up a diversionary topic. Avoid. Deflect. Ignore. Twist words. Rinse. Repeat.

"I care, Agent Booth. I understand that Dr. Brennan has a difficult time understanding that your religious beliefs are important to you and with some timely interventions, we might be able to. . . ."

His words and tone were all meant to convey one thing—he was on Booth's side. He could offer a friendly ear, a strong shoulder. _Tell me your troubles and I will share the load with you. I will be your sounding board. I can help you weather the. . . ._

"That's just a load of shrinky mumbo jumbo, Sweets."

Sweets instantly felt defeated. _I can be your substitute punching bag. _

He took a deep breath and headed back into the fray. "It's not. I want to help. I understand how Dr. Brennan thinks and I can help defuse the situation. She's going to decry the very act of baptism which you hold sacred, one of the sacraments of the church and. . . ."

"I know it's one of the sacraments."

"I know you know. But does Dr. Brennan know? I mean, does she know that you know what she knows?" It was beginning to sound like a comedy routine. "I mean, does she understand how important this is to you?"

"Hold it right there," Booth said, his right hand held up to hold back the words. "Bones and I have talked about what the sacraments mean and she and I are meeting with the priest tomorrow to discuss our daughter's baptism." The agent seemed to be one bundle of taut nerves. "But if you keep talking about it, I might just leave you at the side of the road and let you get your own ride back."

It had been a while since Booth had threatened to shoot him or had retaliated in any way. Revving up his treadmill had been the last act of an angry man and that had been more than a year ago when Booth had been with Hannah and. . . .

"At the risk of having to pull out my cell phone and call a cab, Agent Booth, I just want to say that I understand how difficult it must be for a believer such as yourself to try to make an atheist like Dr. Brennan understand the importance of a religious ritual."

"You understand?"

"Yes."

There was a beat. He'd retreated, stated the obvious and waited. Another beat. If it bothered the man, he might actually open up and let him in. But he hadn't gone there in some time. A long time.

"Bones and I are fine."

He had expected it. _Fine_. Booth hadn't been fine with Hannah, had come to him repeatedly for advice on his son and how to tell Hannah about Dr. Brennan and. . . .

The insight hit him. Booth was protecting something precious. Someone. No, someones. He wasn't confused with Brennan. He might be involved with a woman who hid her feelings under a polar ice cap, but he knew how to drill down to find the warm springs beneath.

Okay, so drill was probably an unfortunate turn of phrase, but it meant only one thing.

"I know you two are fine." He could concede this one. _They were fine._ They would argue and stumble along but in the end, they were fine in only a way that made sense to them. "You'll work out the baptism details." He glanced at Booth who seemed to be considering this new tactic. "I imagine Dr. Brennan, given her past, would appreciate the idea of godparents who would be responsible for the child in some capacity," he offered. "Even if it falls under the guise of tending to the child's spiritual life." _Which she doesn't value._

"What's this, Sweets? A shrinky tactic?" The grin was making a slow comeback. Assured. In control.

"No," he admitted. "Every time I ask about you and Dr. Brennan's relationship, you tell me you two are fine and basically tell me to butt out. So I'm butting out."

The grin. He had to admit it. Booth was doing that more these days. Grinning. Teasing. Poking back. Both of them, actually. Well, Booth more than Dr. Brennan, but that was to be expected. He never quite knew how many of his messages penetrated the fortress she erected to keep out any valuable psychological insights. In some ways, it was as if the two of them were ganging up on him again, like they did back when they were his patients, when they communicated more with their looks than they ever did in his office with their words.

"You want to make sure you're invited to the christening."

He shot a look toward Booth. The tension was gone. The grin had reached his eyes.

The grin was winning.

"Well, you're invited, Sweets. We're just working out the details as to when."

"And if you need someone to step up to be your daughter's godfather, I'd be honored to." It was hard to argue with that grin; sometimes help could be offered by retreating.

Booth shifted slightly. "We already have someone in mind for that, Sweets." He drummed his finger on the steering wheel. "We've already asked them."

"That makes sense," he said. "You've got a brother and Dr. Brennan has a brother and between the two of you, you have enough family you can fall back on. . . ."

He was babbling. Somewhere deep inside he wanted to be the man that Agent Booth could rely on.

"We asked the Hodginses." Booth cut him short. His voice was gentle and low. "Angela is Bones' best friend. And Hodgins. . . ."

"I get it." He did, even if he didn't want to admit it stung that he wasn't first on the list. "I get it. They're a package deal." He couldn't avoid the dig that followed. "All that money doesn't hurt, either."

"They're a couple. Parents." Booth's tone was patient, the same tone he might take with his son or his daughter. "Little Michael's only a few months older than Little Bones. In a way, they're family."

"And you and Dr. Brennan agreed on that."

It made sense. At best, Booth's relationship with his brother was strained and Dr. Brennan's brother had enough to deal with one daughter with cystic fibrosis.

It was rational.

"Yeah," Booth said. "We also want Angela and Hodgins to step in for us in the event something happens."

He studied the man next to him. What he did was dangerous. And Dr. Brennan would follow him into the depths of hell if he were in danger. Despite their differences, that was one truth that bound them together.

They definitely might need a village to raise their child.

"If you need a back-up to your back-up, I could step in."

A frisson of tension seemed to flare up. "We've taken care of that, Sweets." This was tone that he didn't much like. "We've asked Cam and Russ."

"Well, I can understand Hodgins and Angela. And Russ, he is family."

"Cam is a parent, and I've known her for years." The tone was patient. Gentle.

Rational rationale was winning. "Well, I can be your back-up to your back-up's back-up."

Booth frowned. "We've covered that as well. Jared and Padme are on deck for that."

Sweets felt like a balloon with a steady leak. They'd already put together a village for their daughter and he was someone's second cousin twice removed living across the creek that ran under a rickety bridge used only every other weekend but only in a leap year. "You know," he started, the disappointment hard to disguise, "I do spend a great deal more time with you and your daughter than your brother does." He kept his eyes forward, not sure he wanted to see the agent's reaction. "She seems to like me. Mostly."

"Until I told you where the milk she was drinking came from." Booth's look was pure mischief. "You couldn't wait to hand her off."

"I just didn't realize," he sputtered, "I mean, it just caught me by surprise, I mean, do you. . . uh, of course you. . . oh, never mind."

Holding a bottle of milk that had once been produced by Dr. Brennan's breasts had, well, unnerved him for some reason.

He kept his eyes straight, not wanting to see Booth's reaction to his embarrassment. But it wasn't enough; he could still hear Booth laughing at him.

oOo

**Tuesday, 10: 32 a.m.**

He never really had anyone like Seeley Booth as a friend before. He'd hung out with the disenfranchised and the nerdy in high school and while college and grad school put him in contact with the intellectual crowd, he'd never really had many friends like the agent. A guy like Booth was, well, the kind of guy he'd do algebra homework for in high school, watch him as he made the big plays on the football field then see him walk away from the school dance with the prettiest girl on his arm.

Dr. Brennan's assessment had been couched in anthropology—Booth was an alpha male. Sweets had his own labels for the man: athletic, rugged, worldly. A man's man in a very manly profession.

And he liked that he was his right-hand man these days while Dr. Brennan was still on a not-quite-maternity-leave cutback of her time in the field.

"This is it."

The house was a grayish green bungalow, the front porch populated by only a rocking chair and a few potted plants. Booth had drummed it into him that it was important for him to pay attention, to keep a sharp eye out for everything and anything at a scene, even if they were only there to tell a family member that a loved one was dead.

Everything could be a hazard to one's safety.

He re-read the information on the computer and glanced back at the house. A curtain at the window had shifted and he wondered if the occupant had heard their vehicle.

"Ashley and Tom Bancroft. She's a nursing student, he's a machinist. Early thirties." He read the other information from the database. "She reported her sister missing a month ago."

Booth paused before opening his car door. "She's not missing anymore," he said under his breath.

Sweets; waited at the curb for Booth to round the SUV. Death notifications were tough. No matter how gently you conveyed the news, the pain could flare up in dozens of different ways. Dealing with the emotions was difficult, something he was constantly aware of in the next of kin.

And something he tried to measure in himself and the agent.

Dr. Brennan always seemed to want to skip over a short grieving period and get right down to the questions, but when he was alone with Booth, the agent always seemed to know the right moment to begin the questions.

For such a tough man, he had an equally sensitive side.

Sweets appreciated that in Booth. He warmed to people, eased into the questions, offered a bit of comfort that so often translated into key information for the case.

Say what you will, he thought, Booth was a master at using empathy as a tool to extract information.

It was a pleasure watching him at work.

Booth often let him take the lead, too, which always made him feel he was valued as a member of the team. He rang the doorbell and heard the distant chime from somewhere in the house.

"She waited the 48 hours before reporting her missing," he said.

He glanced at Booth who seemed contemplative. "Phone records indicate they talked daily. Sometimes twice a day."

Booth had done his homework, understood the nuances of the case. As his right hand man these days, he appreciated that. He appreciated Booth's handling of the cases, his insights, his doggedness.

It was only a handful of things of many that made him such a good agent.

Behind the door he could hear footsteps and the squeak of the lock turning, then the swoosh of the door being opened. A young woman with tousled hair stood framed by the door, her eyes wide with anticipation and dread.

He confirmed her dread and watched the brown eyes become liquid with grief.

He hated that part of the job.

oOo

**Tuesday, 12:17 p.m.**

He heard rather than saw the ambulances in the distance. Crouching besides Booth, his tie firmly knotted around the agent's arm with a handkerchief in place as a compress, his own hands occupied on the wound to the stomach, he wondered if he was merely the little Dutch boy with fingers in the holes within the dike trying to hold back the inevitable. Booth had lapsed into silence more than a minute ago and he felt only the warm goo of his blood beneath his hands testifying to one truth, and one truth only.

Booth was dying.

After he had turned him over, he had tried to keep Booth talking, tried to equate talking with life because he knew that silence meant only one thing. The agent's eyes were closed and he looked almost peaceful.

"Tell Bones. . . ," he rasped out and Sweets bent toward him.

"I'm so sorry," he gushed.

Had it been a movie, he would have been the sidekick reassuring the main guy that he could tell his own girl whatever he wanted to. He'd be fine.

But he was sure that Booth would not be fine.

The man had stood against their assailant and took him out with one, no, two shots. The first had caught the man in the chest and the second had followed it nearer his heart.

The second man had been a shock, a damned surprise that hadn't stopped Booth. He couldn't count the shots—it seemed like the air sang with a chorus of bullets whizzing past him until both men had been brought down by small bits of metal against flesh.

It had been so quick he had had little time to react. Little time to set things right. Little time.

He should have pulled his gun the moment he saw the shadow.

Booth would have reassured him that a psychologist is not a trained agent and as such would not be expected to react to the sudden movement. Booth would have slapped his shoulder and stared down at the man he had killed and spent his time reassuring him. The sniper comforting the psychologist.

But he had froze and when the other man had trained the gun at him, it had been Booth who had done more than just slap him on the shoulder in reassurance.

He'd taken a bullet before he fired back. He'd taken two more before he put the second big man down.

Sweets had lost count how many times Booth had saved him.

"Tell Bones," the voice came out gruff and uneven. "Tell her I love. . . ."

He would be leaving behind a son and a daughter and a partner.

And an emptiness too great to imagine. 


	3. Regrets

**Tuesday, 10: 43 a.m.**

The sister had cried and disappeared into her grief. There was a lover. A secret lover. A man the sister refused to reveal.

"She'd get this way, you know, when she was seeing someone."

"What way was that?" His voice was soothing, gentle.

"She worked out, wore more makeup, tighter clothes. You know."

The sister had practically shredded the Kleenex in her hands. Pieces littered the coffee table that held several open textbooks.

"And she didn't tell you his name?"

She shook her head. "I figured he was married. Or seeing someone else." Her hands twisted the wad of tissues as if wringing out the tears. "She knew I wouldn't approve."

Booth had been mostly silent in the interview, but now he offered his own question. "Anyone she might confide in?"

She thought for a moment and nodded slowly. "Tommy. My husband, Tommy." She sighed. "She'd go to him for advice, you know, what men like, that kind of thing."

"Is it possible she told him the guy's name?"

It was subtle, but telling. "Yeah, probably." Her voice had fallen from the higher registers to deliver the line.

"Well, that's all we need for now," said Booth as he stood and offered his business card. "If you can think of anything else. . . ."

He had thought of a few other things to ask, just to confirm his hunch, but Booth had cut off the interview and was trying to usher him to the door. Dr. Brennan would have persisted in questioning the woman, no doubt, and she, in turn, would have set off alarms that would have alerted the husband to their new suspicion.

"Yes, thank you Mrs. Bancroft." He offered a small salve. "And again, we're very sorry for your loss."

He couldn't help it once they were clear of the door and were halfway to the SUV. "You think she told the husband the guy's name?" He liked being on the same page with Booth.

Booth remained silent until they had reached the car and he looked back toward the house. The curtains remained still.

"I think the sister was screwing the husband."

oOo

**Tuesday, 11:57 a.m.**

Usually a man tries to hide his guilt. He tries to pretend he had nothing to do with someone's death. But he reveals small clues, personal tells when he is lying. He tries to shore up the defenses, but eventually, his need to relieve the pressure gives and he begins to pour out his guilt, his pain.

Tom Bancroft had only to take one look at the SUV and the two of them to skip to the last act of a desperate man.

They'd entered the machinist's shop through the warehouse and walked between the rows of pallets, directly toward Bancroft's workspace when Sweets saw the shadow. He'd thought nothing of it. Only later, in hindsight, had he attached the shadow to the man and the man to the glint of steel and the glint of steel to the gun.

He could have shouted, alerted Booth before the man began to fire, but he was caught in his own indecision, his own guilt. Booth returned fire, pushed him to the ground and took the bullets meant for him.

Usually a man tries to hide his guilt. He tries to pretend he had nothing to do with someone's death.

But there was no pretending about this.

oOo

**Tuesday, 12:17 p.m. **

He had wanted to ride to the hospital in the ambulance as if his presence might guarantee that Booth would not die along the way, but he could not make those first steps to even ask.

They'd cut off Booth's coat and his shirt and he had retrieved the coat from the ground and cradled it next to his own coat, sullied by Booth's blood.

Three men were down and he hadn't a scratch.

No. He was bloodied by the guilt.

One of the officers put him in a car and he'd had to bend his knees to avoid the computer screen at the passenger seat.

"Here," the man had said as he swiveled it out of his way. "I have a couple more details and then I'll take you to the hospital."

He'd sat in the car and waited, the blood drying on his hands.

He wanted to wipe it off, wipe it off and get out his cell phone and call someone.

He'd done dozens of death notifications. Tell them quickly. Dispassionately. Show concern when appropriate. Reach out and offer a human touch to some. Show compassion.

Each situation dictated a different approach. Read the person. Understand what they need. Know who they are on the suspect chain. Continue to read the person as they experience the first pangs of loss. Be present.

He'd been present when Dr. Brennan had been told years ago that Agent Seeley Booth had died. The bullet meant for her had taken his life.

He'd been more than present. He'd concocted the lie so that he could observe her reaction. The best lab in the whole U.S. and he had a prime subject.

With his legs bent in that passenger seat, with his hands red with blood, he wondered if this was his punishment for that time, that place.

Before he could consider anything more, he felt the car shudder as the officer pulled open the door and sat next to him. "Wipe off your hands," the man said. He put a plastic cylinder in his hands and popped open the top. "Wipe your hands," the man repeated. "Don't want the nurses at the hospital to strap you to a gurney thinking you're one of the victims."

The man had meant it as a joke, but Sweets felt the bile at the base of his throat and swallowed hard.

"Your guy married?"

He tried to make his hands work, make them meet together with the wet towel between them, but all he seemed to be doing was smearing the blood.

"Your guy married? Booth, is it? We should call someone?"

The words finally registered. "Yeah. Uhm, he's not married. She wouldn't marry him."

"Bureau called a doctor. That his partner?"

"Yeah," Sweets sputtered. The air in the car was stale and he wanted fresh air badly. He fumbled for the window control. "Dr. Brennan."

The window burst open to his right and he sucked in the cool air.

"She's the bone lady? Works out of the Jeffersonian?"

Nodding and grunting was about the best he could offer.

"Worked a case out of Little Italy with her once. Years back. She's an intense one that one."

The man was only trying for normalcy, a means of making the surreal less real, but Sweets really wished he would just shut up.

"They have a girl. Little girl. Baby really. Two. She's just two months."

He was babbling. The air had done nothing for him really. Looking down in his lap, his hands were white against a sea of pinkish wet wipes.

"That's rough, man," the cop said. "Kids should know their dads."

"He's not dead," Sweets felt his voice burst. "He can't be dead."

He heard the sigh from the other man. Long and slow like he was trying to push away the truth.

"All I know is that they were working on him. They stabilized him for transport and he'll be at the head of the line when they get him there." There was that sigh again. Like he'd seen too much and not enough and there was nothing else to say or do. "I was in Iraq. Saw a guy take as many hits as that one did and he walked away. Well, got sent home. He's up and walking and everything."

Sweets swiveled his head to look at the officer. He could tell the man was lying.

"Up and walking," Sweets echoed the man's words. "Up and walking."

oOo

**Tuesday, 12:29 p.m.**

They had tracked the husband to his machinist's shop, but it had been Booth's radar that had spotted the trouble. Booth had pushed him down, pulled him to safety, shot at their assailant and tumbled face downward toward oblivion.

Sweets steadied himself as he stepped from the car and tentatively took his first steps.

"Hey, there." He felt someone grab him and right him as his knees quaked. "Can't have you becoming one of the patients, Doc." 

Grunting, he pulled himself up and held a bit too long onto the car. "I'm fine," he finally said.

"Yeah, well, the waiting room for the OR's on 5? Got it?"

He nodded and swallowed hard and took a deep breath. "Five."

He repeated the floor number like a mantra, and tried to regain control of his body. In the elevator he leaned a bit too heavily on the rail and felt the thing vibrate, then shudder to a stop, but he felt no compunction to be like one of Pavlov's dogs and obey the door. By the time he'd hit the open button and watched it close three times, he had had enough.

The waiting room he'd been directed to was devoid of much personality, filled with someone's idea of comfortable seating. He opted for standing and pacing and casting looks toward the hallway as he tried to collect himself.

Tried to make sense of what had happened.

Had he been a half-second sooner, a second sooner. . . the what ifs came at him with a vengeance. That was the torture. He knew it would be better to concentrate on his breathing, concentrate on calming his nerves, concentrate on the now rather than then.

Then was about guilt. Now was about comfort. Then was about failure. Now was about hope.

Then was about letting Booth down. Letting Brennan down. Letting their baby, that sweet, little innocent. . . .

"Dr. Sweets?"

He turned toward his name and instantly wanted to hide from it. "Agent Shaw?" His voice cracked into a million little pieces. "Shaw? What are you doing here?"

"Agent Booth was shot. This is where they brought him. This is where they brought you. I'm just here to get your statement."

If he'd been calmer, if his heart wasn't in his throat, he'd have noticed that her voice, already in a high range had gained an octave from stress. He'd have noticed the nervous dance of her hands, the stiffness of her posture.

"Statement? Now?"

She nodded. "Danforth. Agent Danforth, that is, is taking over the investigation and he wants to know if there was anyone else on scene."

"Yes, of course." His heart was slowing the drumbeats in his head. "What. . . what about the others? Dr. Brennan?"

She shuffled nervously. "The dispatcher contacted the assistant deputy director. . . ."

The words blended together in a mismash of bureaucratic lines of command and communication.

"No one's informed Dr. Brennan?"

This time his voice rose with the indignation and disbelief. Jamming his hand in his coat pocket, he grabbed at the cell, dried blood marking his last phone call. His fingers, clumsy and stiff, began to simultaneously wipe at the streaks of brownish-red while trying to bring the thing back to life.

He felt rather than saw Shaw's hand on his wrist. "Dispatch called the Jeffersonian and informed Dr. Saroyan of Agent Booth's con. . . ."

"No." He began to panic, pressing at the phone's directory, trying to wipe away the streaks, feeling the tide of fear and guilt rising. "That's wrong. They're partners. They have a daughter. That's wrong. She should be told the truth, she needs the truth. No matter. . . ."

This time the sharp squeeze to his wrist stopped him. "We felt it best if Dr. Saroyan told Dr. Brennan. She should hear it from a friend rather than from a stranger."

It made sense, but it didn't make sense at the same time and he knew it was wrong and the right thing to do. "Yes, yes. . . no. No," he said as it finally registered. "They should be here first. She should be here first. She should be the first to know. God."

He punctuated the word with a snap of his wrist, wrenching it from Shaw and thrusting the offending phone back into his pocket.

"You should have called her first. She should have been the first."

"I know she's his partner. . . and more. . . but she isn't technically his wife, his legal next of kin and. . . ."

"No," he cried, his voice reverberating in the large room. "This is bad. So bad. She lived through this once. Thought he was dead for two weeks. Two weeks. This is going to destroy her. She's invested in him. In them. In her. They have a daughter."

He had Shaw's arms in hand and he folded his frame toward her as he tried to shake some sense into her. "She needs the truth," he finally said as he realized what he was doing and let go of Shaw. "She needs to be told the truth," he repeated.

"She needs to know."

Before he could change the direction of the day, he heard his name again and looked up to see Dr. Saroyan leading Angela and Dr. Brennan with Dr. Hodgins bringing up the rear. "Dr. Sweets?" Dr. Saroyan asked. "Have you heard anything?"

The shock of seeing his colleagues from the Jeffersonian left him momentarily tongue-tied. Dr. Brennan was pale and quiet, her eyes lasering in on him "They took him immediately into the operating room," he said, his words seemed to somersault toward them. "I haven't heard anything more."

"He took three bullets to the torso," Shaw recited. She placed the bullets on Booth's frame, one near the shoulder, two to the chest, one upper, one lower and he almost saw them hit the agent again as he blinked.

He vowed never to blink again.

"Are you all right, Dr. Sweets?"

Dr. Brennan was hugging herself, her control brittle. But her words somehow made him want to cry.

"Yeah, yeah," he said. "Not a scratch."

She pointed at his hands and he looked at them as if they belonged to someone else. Streaked with dried blood, his cuffs framing them with darker stains, he instantly tried to pull the outer jacket's sleeves over the offending ones. "Fine. I'm fine." He looked up panicked at the concern in her eyes. "Excuse me," he choked out as he turned and raced toward the bathroom he'd seen down the hall as the bile in his throat refused to stay down.

oOo

He'd passed the test, replayed it a hundred times in the days that followed. He'd been through the alley, took out his targets, got shot for his efforts and earned Booth's confidence.

But it wasn't the same.

Even in a simulation such as that, it wasn't the same as bullets flying in the air toward their targets. Especially when the target could be you.

Booth had always impressed that upon him.

He'd taken the caution seriously, made a regular practice of hitting the range and hitting his targets and learning from the lessons on the job. While Booth constantly reminded him he was but a mere psychologist and his greatest weapon was his awareness of human nature, he knew that understanding would never stop a bullet. He'd read enough of Booth's case files to know the danger the agent had been in over the years.

He knew. Intellectually.

But knowing a thing and acting on a thing were two different paths. Both Booth and Brennan could tell him that although they would have found two different ways to do so. Victims and perpetrators told him that every case. Knowing a thing. Acting on a thing. Two different things entirely.

The difference between life and death.

Victims and perpetrators told him that every case.

But so did Booth's riddled body.

oOo

**Tuesday, 12:53 p.m.**

"You okay, man?"

Jack Hodgins hovered near the sink as Sweets cupped his hand under the faucet to catch the water to rinse the taste from his mouth.

His hands carried the faint scent of the soap, something medicinal and lingering. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and leaned heavily on the sink.

"You sure you weren't hurt?"

He shook his head.

"It's rough to see something like that." He felt Hodgin's hand on his shoulder.

The sympathy unleashed something in him. "I should have done something."

He waited for confirmation or condemnation, but he got neither.

"We need you to pull it together, Sweets. Ange's real worried about Brennan. She's doing the origami thing."

He looked up at Hodgins. "What?"

"She calls it folding into herself. You know how she gets."

"What does she know?"

"Just what Shaw's told us. What they told Dr. Saroyan. You and Booth were ambushed. Both of the gunmen were shot." He paused. "You really sure you're okay?"

He nodded as he straightened and tried to look at himself, but it was difficult. His hair was mussed and his shirt—one of his favorites—couldn't hide the bloodstains along his collar or on the front or bordering his cuffs. Yet, he looked almost normal. But nothing really felt normal. "I should have done something," he repeated.

Hodgins' hand clutched his shoulder. "You were there, Sweets. You called for the ambulance, probably saved Booth's life. That's something."

Something translated into nothing as he made his way back to the lounge. Brennan was standing eyes wide and seeming to take in everything. Dr. Saroyan and Angela were both perched on the couches as if ready to fly off at the earliest provocation.

Shaw stood the closest, though. "Are you all right, Dr. Sweets?"

"Yeah, yeah," he said, the words raspy. "I'm fine. Just fine."

"If you wouldn't mind, Dr. Sweets, I really need to get your statement on the incident." Her voice hit a lower register, direct and forceful, professional. "I have a room here we can go to unless you'd rather go to the office."

He nodded dumbly wondering when he had become like Booth's bobblehead bobby.

A glance at Brennan told him everything he needed to know—she was indeed folding in on herself, the leaves forming a protective seal against the emotions raging within.

"You'll call me if anything changes?" he asked Hodgins. Another look at Brennan gave him another reason to flee.

oOo

**Tuesday, 12:59 p.m.**

He knew the procedure. Set down on tape or in writing everything you remember. Then do it again sometime later.

Cops asked the same questions again and again in case some memory got jogged, some detail came loose. In a shooting, even one as unavoidable as the one he'd been a part of, there were rules.

Shaw was trying to make things as easy as possible. "Here, drink this. It will help."

He gulped the tepid coffee and was grateful she had stolen him away from the waiting room and the icy blue eyes of Dr. Brennan. He rested his elbows on the table and held the paper cup in both of his hands.

Replaying the events had been helpful, but embarrassing. He'd soldiered through, explaining that everything had gone so quickly he had little time to react. But he could tell from Shaw's glances that she saw him for the coward he was.

"I should have done something more," he said.

"Such as?"

She was in investigative mode, by the damned book, and he suddenly had the strong desire to confess all.

"I should have pulled out my gun and fired. I should have seen the shadow and known what it meant. I should have done something more. Damn it."

He slammed the paper cup to the table and sloshed a few drops onto the table.

"I'm not sure how to respond to that, Dr. Sweets."

"Booth's lying in that operating room because of me. If I had reacted more quickly, if I had done something, he wouldn't be fighting for his life. And Dr. Brennan. . . ."

Shaw waited a beat under hooded eyes and then finally asked him, "Do you want me to put that in the report?"

He sat back and angrily swiped at the drops of spilled coffee. "Maybe you should."

Instead, she put down the pen she had been holding and her hands retreated to her lap. "This is always hard on family and friends."

She was almost a miniature Dr. Brennan, stating the obvious. But he couldn't refute her words. He'd said them too many times himself.

"I know that Agent Booth and Dr. Brennan have not been together long as a couple, just a year or so, but I know that they have been together as partners a long time." Shaw was laying down planks of truth in the hopes that he would provide additional information.

He dove right in.

"She would have seen it. Done something. Shot back. Protected his back." He stood up and began a nervous pacing between the table and the wall of the break room. "The worst part about all of this is that he was right. He was right. I'm not any good with a gun. I thought I had it all covered. Thought I could shoot someone when the time came, but I froze." He felt the weight of his guilt suffocating him. "I feel like I should have done something."

Shaw stood. "I think I have all that I need right now."

He felt deflated. "Is that it? Is that all you have to say?"

She looked at him and for a moment he wondered what it would be like to rewind the day. "I can't say I fully understand what you are feeling, Dr. Sweets, but from what you've told me and from the information we got from forensics on the scene, I would have to say, off the record, sir, that you were lucky to survive."

That stopped him.

"Agent Booth says that sometimes people just want to have a witness to their lives and sometimes that's all it takes. One witness who helps understand what happened." She straightened and turned to leave. "You were a witness today, Dr. Sweets."

oOo

**Tuesday, 1:36 p.m.**

He returned to the lounge area hoping for and dreading news. Dr. Brennan had disappeared as had Dr. Hodgins. Angela was flipping through a ratty magazine while Dr. Saroyan was off in the corner talking on her cell phone.

"Anything, yet?"

Angela tossed the magazine to the table and shook her head. "But I can give you 25 ways to get stains out of your clothes and 17 new pudding recipes." Her sigh came out as more of a groan. "This is real hard to take right now."

"Where are the others?"

He was concerned about Dr. Brennan, concerned for the distance he'd seen growing in her eyes before he left.

"Jack's gone to get the babies. Michelle's going to watch them. Cam's on the phone with the lab. Bren's talking to some agents down the hall."

"Wow." He sat down heavily next to Angela and fingered the magazine she'd abandoned on the table. "If there are phone calls to be made, Booth's brother, his grandfather. . . ."

"Brennan did that on the way over here." Angela laid a hand on his arm. "She called Rebecca and Jared. Jared decided not to tell Booth's grandfather quite yet, but you know Brennan's not happy with that. Rebecca isn't going to want to scare Parker. How are you doing?"

"I wish everyone would stop asking me that." He wasn't the patient, not by a remote chance and he didn't deserve all the concern. "I should have, I don't know, been able…."

Angela's phone chirped, interrupting him. "Jack?"

What followed was a laundry list of details for taking care of the two babies—removing Brennan's car seat and installing it into Angela's van, retrieving milk bottles from the nursery, extra diapers and bedding. He tried to follow the thread, but it got tangled in his mind as he heard only snippets in the shorthand of people who had been together for some time.

Instead, he wandered toward the hallway and looked toward the direction of the operating room, hoping some word was forthcoming.

He saw Brennan down the hall talking with two men dressed in suits, standard-issue FBI attire. She was contained in her motions, almost robotic as she tried to make her point.

The two men, if possible, were more stoic in expression than she was.

A sigh erupted next to him and he turned toward it. "Do you know the agent next to Danforth?" asked Dr. Saroyan.

"Stevers? Seavers?" He tried to gauge the direction of the conversation at the other end of the hallway. "Are they talking to her about Booth?"

Dr. Saroyan shook her head. "They're taking over the murder investigation. Apparently you two stumbled into something." She waved her phone. "I had to authorize the lab to release all the evidence to the FBI right away."

"They're taking over the case?" Somehow his head felt hollow. "Why?"

"Does it matter?" she asked, her eyes glued to the scene down the hall. "I don't think any of us are up to working it now anyway."

oOo

**Tuesday, 1:56 p.m.**

"Dr. Lance Sweets?"

The tone should have been a warning, but he looked up anyway from the article in the dog-eared magazine. He'd been circling the 8 common household products everyone should have, waiting for an opportunity to talk to Dr. Brennan. But she'd been on the phone for almost 20 minutes fending off queries from Booth's brother and talking to Rebecca while trying to help out Michelle who was dealing with a fussy infant.

"You're Dr. Sweets, right?"

He finally realized someone was talking to him—he was more engaged in trying for an opening in the barrage of phone calls Dr. Brennan was dealing with than in paying attention to much else.

"Yeah. I'm Dr. Sweets." Peering up, the afternoon sunlight streaming in caused him to squint and move his head to avoid the glare before he could place the agent staring back at him. "You're Danforth."

"Agent Matthew Danforth." The man sounded almost annoyed to have to correct him. "If you follow me, I need to ask you a few questions about the case you and Agent Booth were working on."

Sweets unfolded himself from the couch and followed the man down the hallway toward the break room Agent Shaw had steered him to earlier.

Danforth gestured toward a chair and Sweets began to pull it out from under the table when he stopped. "Did the men who ambushed Agent Booth and myself know we were from the FBI investigating a murder?"

Danforth remained impassive. "I don't know. Didn't Agent Booth identify himself before they started shooting?"

Sweets chose to ignore the tone. "I was just thinking that they must have been warned by someone, probably the wife. I know it's not much, but. . . ."

"Just stick to your shrinking, Doctor. We already picked up the wife for questioning." He studied Sweets. "The back warehouse was home to undocumented goods. The Federal government shows up," he said, "and the math adds up wrong. We're still checking ownership records on the machinist shop, but we also have information on a local trucking company that might be hauling the goods."

Sweets sat down at the news. "Wow. We really did stumble into a hornet's nest."

Danforth pulled out his chair scraping it against the floor. "Booth, who has a reputation as a smart agent, took a civilian in as back-up."

"Was that a question?"

"An observation." Danforth sat down. "Civilians aren't trained agents."

Sweets felt unsettled by the statement. "Agent Booth likes me to accompany him because I offer psychological insights. . . ." He played out his reasoning, the one he often pulled out for Dr. Brennan who would question the whole of psychology, but he could see he was having as much effect as he usually did on the anthropologist.

Danforth's mouth moved into a grimace. "I'm not here for the brochure, Doctor. I simply have a few more questions about what went down this morning."

"Agent Booth finds my presence quite helpful on the investigations."

Danforth leaned in, the line of his mouth thin like barbed wire. "The man loves to haul out his girlfriend or you into the field, that's fine. But it got him shot this morning." His annoyance bled out of his tone. "Anybody in the field who is a liability is liable to get someone killed. We don't have any damned drones to send out there like the Army."

This time Sweets felt his chest go hollow, his heart echoing in the chamber and in his ears. "I was issued a . . . ."

"Doctor," Danforth said as he leaned in further, "you did not discharge your weapon. Agent Booth pushed you out of the way and lost precious seconds that might have cost him his life. It's all about timing. Too much time, a second's hesitation and you're watching your blood spill out."

"The opposite is true in surgery. Agent Booth is in surgery, what, for the last hour or so and each minute he's in there is another minute closer to him not getting out of there. Look it up. I know gunshot stats aren't your thing, Doc, but they're mine. He can take all the civilians he wants out into the field, but ultimately it's a fool's errand because he's got to take care of two people rather than just himself."

"Agent Booth brought this on himself."


	4. Bitter Sweets

**Tuesday, 4:45 p.m.**

Standing under the spray of water, he wished that was all that was needed to wash away the stains of the day and Danforth's words. Intellectually, he knew that agents tended to be quite emotional, almost irrational in the face of the shooting of one of their own. They question their mortality even as another battled for life.

He had counseled more than one agent in the wake of another's shooting.

In Danforth's words had been blades of truth cutting through his own control and once the interview had been concluded he had fled from the hospital, fled from talking to Dr. Brennan.

Fled.

Somehow it seemed fitting.

He let the water run until it cooled then stepped out of the shower and toweled dry. Going back to the hospital seemed out of the question, yet as he dressed he was drawn back to the hospital, back to Booth's surgery, back to the people waiting the outcome.

He reclaimed his cell phone from his suit jacket crumpled on the floor of the bathroom. He kicked at it before scooping it up and folding it a bit before placing it in the bin for the dry cleaning. The ruined shirt he simply wadded up and strode toward the kitchen where he deposited it in the trash.

Sitting at the kitchen table, he ignored the rumblings of his stomach and flipped through his messages. He answered Daisy's texts—increasingly frantic missives—with a simple note that he was fine; her real concern should be with Agent Booth.

It was true and not true at the same time, a paradox of sorts. He was of little use at the hospital and no use to his patients, but something was bothering him about the investigation. Dialing the number, he tried to organize his thoughts, provide one last clue in the puzzle with the hope that maybe he could offer something today besides inaction and hesitation.

She picked up on the second ring.

"Shaw."

He paused, cleared his throat and tried to start.

"Dr. Sweets?" This time she paused and he wondered how much better cell phones would be if they had a rewind button. "Did you remember something?"

"The wife." He tried to re-order the thoughts he had already organized. "She must have called the husband and that warned him."

She repeated what Danforth had said, that the wife had been brought in for questioning.

"Booth said something," he offered. "Said he thought the husband was probably having an affair with the sister."

Shaw seemed unimpressed.

"What if the husband had been involved in the smuggling, providing a place, a conduit for the goods or what have you and the wife realizes he's cheating and sets this whole thing up?" He was warming to the story. "Makes it seem like the sister is a victim of the smuggling ring and gets Agent Booth to execute the wrongdoers so there is no evidence to the contrary? She gets away with murder."

He liked his theory. Liked how it explained everything, provided answers. Put the blame on someone.

Someone other than himself.

"The husband wasn't one of the two men that Agent Booth shot," Shaw said. "He wasn't even on scene, so the working theory is that the wife called him warned him off. He might have killed the sister to keep her quiet about the smuggling. He took off. Danforth is waiting to talk to the other man when he comes out of surgery."

Suddenly his theory seemed waterlogged and sinking fast. "The husband isn't. . . you mean he wasn't at the scene?"

"Phone records indicate that the wife did text her husband minutes after you left." Shaw seemed to be reading something. "You arrive at the machinist's shop at 11:59. Shots were fired at 12:01. . . ."

He listened to the timeline, the one he had provided to Shaw and wondered what was missing. "The husband wasn't there?"

"Danforth has issued an alert to all agencies that he is a person of interest in the case."

The scenario he had posited took another turn. "The wife calls the husband, warns him?" He didn't think it made sense just seconds after thinking it had. "He turns the goons on us? Takes off? Something's not right." He hesitated. "Booth thought the husband was having an affair. I agree. The smuggling complicates everything."

Shaw gave him little more and he sat at the kitchen table for several minutes before attempting to stand and restart part of his day. He managed a foray into the refrigerator to locate some leftover lasagna. Leaning against the counter, he debated whom he should contact at the hospital when his cell rang and the question was answered for him.

"Sweets?" It was Hodgin's voice, emotional and low. "You better get back here, man. Things aren't good."

oOo

**Tuesday, 5:37 p.m.**

Brennan looked like one of those trees on a lone hill, vulnerable and yet, strong. Invincible.

It was the first image of the waiting room that had seemed to grow smaller as the number of people grew.

Along with the people from the lab, Jared had shown up, Padme in tow. Max Keenan was talking with a nurse, his hand on her elbow, Cam next to him. Hodgins was holding Angela who seemed torn between remaining secure within her husband's embrace or chancing the forlorn figure of her friend.

Brennan was watching the conversation between her father, her friend, and the nurse, but she seemed more involved in an internal conversation. Brennan, seemingly rooted to her spot, took only a second more to uproot herself and stride purposely toward the nurse that Cam and her father were talking to. In a manner that brooked no nonsense, she conveyed her message to the nurse who, unmoved by either Cam or Max, nodded gravely and turned back toward the operating suites.

"What's going on?" Sweets asked Jared.

"Seeley came out of surgery about 40 minutes ago and they've taken him back a few minutes ago." Jared looked ashen. "Temperance was with him when he began hemorrhaging or something. Seizing." He rubbed at the back of his neck. "Damn it anyway."

"It wasn't clear why they took him back," Padme said. "Cam said they called some kind of a code in his room."

Sweets craned his neck and saw the two people who could best answer the question deep in conversations. Whatever Brennan had said to the nurse had reverberated with Cam who seemed to be explaining something to Angela and Hodgins. Brennan was now engaged in explaining something to her father.

It didn't look good.

Max Brennan drew his daughter into his arms and Brennan stiffly complied for a moment before she regained whatever strength she needed and withdrew. But Max did not let go. He took her arm and steered her to a chair on the opposite side of the lounge, away from everyone.

Sweets saw his chance.

"Dr. Saroyan?"

She turned toward him. "Seeley's blood pressure dropped." She glanced toward Brennan. "Dr. Brennan was in the room with him and alerted the staff that he probably had internal bleeding. She called it before the monitor's alarm went off. They took him back into surgery and they believe they caught the bleeding in time."

"She caught it before the alarms went off?" He pointed toward Dr. Brennan as surreptitiously as he could. Even he might not have taken her suggestion seriously.

She hugged herself and turned away from the direction of her colleague. "She noticed something was wrong. Off. Dr. Brennan told the nurse who ignored it. Seconds later all hell broke loose." She bobbed her head toward the hallway. "Brennan just pointed out to the nurse that Booth tends to react badly to anesthesia and I think they took her seriously this time." She paused. "Given everything, she only wants Booth to have a fighting chance to get through this."

"Why was the nurse so. . . ," he couldn't find the right word. "What was the problem with the nurse?"

"Dr. Brennan was right before. She knows Seeley, but they don't know her." Cam looked pale and worn. "Let's hope there are no complications with the anesthesia."

oOo

**Wednesday, 12:03 p.m.**

Dr. Temperance Brennan was as much a student of Seeley Joseph Booth as he was a student of the two of them. She knew the man, knew his idiosyncrasies, knew his medical history probably better than anyone. When Booth had exhibited symptoms congruent with a brain tumor, she had been the first to notice, the first to raise the alarm.

Sweets studied the woman, studied her careful movements as she waited. Someone, perhaps it had been Hodgins, had brought in some food to tide them over hours ago and while most of them had eaten something, Brennan had done little more than push the food around her plate before giving up on it altogether.

The hospital staff, reluctant to let loose the world-renown forensic anthropologist on the surgical staff again, had taken their time transferring Booth to the ICU and had sent in a very young medical assistant to inform their group about any progress.

As it was, Brennan was given only 15 minutes in the room with Booth, a reunion they all had initially watched from the observation window. The woman who had waited with a brittle strength throughout much of the afternoon and early evening, the woman who had bullied the hospital staff to look deeper into Booth's relapse, the woman who had kept them all calm with her own stoicism had seemed to melt at the sight of the still-unconscious Booth and they had all turned away to give her some privacy for the nakedness of the emotions she could no longer hide.

Years ago when he had removed Dr. Brennan's name from the list of people who were to be informed that Agent Booth was not deceased, he had done so as a kind of experiment. While he had denied it at the time, told himself and others that it was merely a way to further protect the agent because fewer people knew he was alive, he knew it really was meant to be a catalyst to determining the extent of feelings Dr. Brennan had for her partner.

Now, as he sat next to her, waiting for Booth to regain consciousness, he felt an overwhelming need to apologize. For the lie, years ago. For the hesitation in the field earlier.

For everything and anything he'd ever done to cause her pain.

She seemed just so fragile beside him.

It had taken him hours to scare up the courage. Hours in which the others had slowly drifted away. First Cam—if only to shore up her daughter caring for two infants. Then Max, who promised to sneak his granddaughter into the hospital, tomorrow. Angela had hung around, worried about Brennan, but Hodgins persuaded her to go, finally. If nothing else, Michelle had earned a reprieve. Jared had taken his 15 minutes in the ICU with his big brother, glancing frequently at the monitors and machines, wiping just as frequently at his eyes. Then he and Padme had tried to persuade Brennan to go home, to get some sleep, to escape the confines of the hospital.

It was only when Sweets offered to stay with her in the lounge through the night did Jared finally relent and head home.

Alone with Brennan, the courage had evaporated. Usually he could stand toe-to-toe with her in philosophical debates or refuse to back down when she dissed psychology or dismissed his theories.

But there was no challenge here, no argument.

He'd messed up.

Spectacularly.

While one life was still balanced between life and death, other lives were balanced on hope and false hope. A doctor had finally talked to their group—at Jared's insistence as his brother—and given them a general timetable on which to pin their hopes. If Booth made it through the next 24 to 48 hours, he stood a good chance for a full recovery. If.

Brennan had chosen to wait those hours in the hospital. And he'd chosen to pay his penance beside her, a silent witness to the wounds he had inflicted by doing nothing.

He'd fortified their corner of the lounge with pillows and blankets procured from a nurse and they had hunkered down for the night. He'd offered to take the first watch, to let her sleep, and she had curled up on one of the couches and closed her eyes.

Watching her, he wondered if he'd ever find the words to ease the wounds he had inflicted. But he seemed caught in an endless loop of inaction when it counted the most. One-by-one, everyone had said something to Brennan, offered some encouragement, but he hadn't been able to do even that.

"There's coffee in the lounge."

He looked up from the magazine in his lap and blinked.

"Coffee?"

It was the very young medical assistant who had become their messenger from the nurse's station.

"Yeah, sure." He glanced at Brennan. She seemed to be sleeping, the inverted V between her eyes had eased somewhat and she seemed almost peaceful. "I think I could use a cup."

"Liquid caffeine," she said. "Coming right up."

He followed her, landing in the same staff lounge that had been Danforth's interrogation chamber. Swallowing his feelings, he accepted the cup of coffee and settled into the seat opposite the young woman.

"You all work together?" she asked. "The nurses were saying your friend was a novelist."

He studied her nametag. Cara. "We're colleagues. Booth and I are with the FBI. He's an agent and I'm a psychologist. The others are scientists who work at the Jeffersonian and we all solve murders together." He blew on his coffee. "Dr. Brennan is a novelist, but that's not really her primary role."

"The way she told that nurse what was wrong with Mr. Booth, that was amazing." The young woman leaned into her observation. "I mean, she pinpointed where the bleeding was and insisted the doctors look there first. You called her doctor, so she's, what, a pathologist?"

Sweets felt himself smiling at the notion. "No, she's an anthropologist. A forensic anthropologist who specializes in identifying human remains. Bones, really. They're partners professionally and personally."

"She's_ the_ Temperance Brennan?" Cara sat back in her chair and looked impressed. "I knew she worked in the area. . . ."

Her eyes had grown larger and she idly fingered the handle of her coffee cup. "I've read all her books." This time when she leaned in, her voice was almost conspiratorial. "So the patient, that's Andy?"

Sweets decided not to fuel her imagination; he'd done enough damage for the day. "That would be a question for Dr. Brennan," he offered instead.

"I suppose," she relented. "Still. . . I see how she could take real life and enhance it. He took three bullets and stood up against two gunmen from what I understand. Must have been like the Wild Wild West." She sipped her coffee. "You must be good friends to stay with her like this."

He didn't quite know how to answer that statement, so he said nothing.

"Do you want to see him? Just for a second?"

He nodded without thinking and soon found himself standing at Booth's bed, the monitors providing a slow heartbeat to the room.

"I'll leave you be for a bit, but don't stay too long. The night nurse comes in to check vitals in a few."

With that, she was gone and Sweets found himself wading through waves of guilt. Booth lay still, the only movement coming from his chest rising and falling beneath layers of bandages. He was plugged into several monitors through a series of wires and tubes which ran from his left arm toward a plastic IV bag filled with clear liquid. The man who he had been talking to just that morning about his daughter's baptism seemed somehow smaller in the bed. "I'm sorry, Agent Booth," he began, his voice breaking. "I should have done something more than just stand there, today. I should have been more observant. At least, pulled my gun and drawn fire so I would be the one in that bed rather than you. I thought I could do it."

He couldn't guess Booth's response, not really, despite years of observing the man.

The only response came from the monitors, a steady rhythm of beeps that gave voice only to how surreal everything had become. On the one display, he watched as the numbers went through their cycle, blood pressure and heartbeat changing only slightly before starting all over again.

He wished he could talk to the man. He wished he could do something more than feel helpless.

"Booth never wanted you to be in a position to kill someone."

He turned and saw Dr. Brennan at the threshold of the room. She was backlit, the light casting a halo around her body, her features shadowed and unreadable.

"Booth said he didn't want you to ever have to kill anyone. He didn't want you to be changed by taking someone's life."

Sweets couldn't speak. Dr. Brennan rarely seemed insightful enough into the human condition to have given him some peace with her words. She seemed more in tune with practical needs rather than those of the heart. But she was a student of the man in the bed and knew his mind better than anyone.

"His blood pressure is steady."

Her words were murmured, but they were perfectly her. She stepped further into the room and he could see the steady concentration she gave to the sleeping form on the bed and to the monitors silently marking his vital signs.

"I should have done something more today." He'd found his voice, but he couldn't quite find the words to convey some measure of comfort to a woman who he had wronged. "He saved my life."

"You were there to call the ambulance." She stepped further into the room, to the opposite side of Booth's bed and laid a hand on her partner's arm. Her focus on Booth never wavered.

"Booth told me that killing a man changes a person, puts a tremendous burden on him. Booth understands these things better than I do, Dr. Sweets." She paused and he couldn't help but stare at her.

"You've killed before." The words felt far too blunt and cruel. "What kind of burden is it if it saves someone's life? What burden do we bear if we do nothing and stand by while someone is shot? Or killed?"

Her eyes left the man on the bed for a moment as she seemed to measure him. The intensity of her look could unnerve those people who did not know her so well. But even then he felt himself fraying at the edges under her gaze. "I know I did the only thing I could do at the time. I can rationalize what I've done, Dr. Sweets." Her voice sounded strained, tired. She finally turned back to her partner. "Booth wasn't sure that you could do the same."

oOo

Tuesday rolled into Wednesday and sometime during that time, Booth slipped into a coma.

Dr. Brennan, already a seasoned veteran at waiting for Booth, had listened to the doctor's assessment with an eggshell calm. Sweets had sat in the lounge next to her, watching, waiting, wondering if she would break, but she had only nodded and sank back into the couch.

Wednesday rolled into Thursday and Booth remained stable, but comatose.

Unlike the last time when she had sat with him for days, she had a two-month old to consider and the baby needed her as much as she needed to sit with her partner. So she split time between the hospital and a hotel room near the hospital where she installed her father as a part-time babysitter during the evenings. During the day, she let the Jeffersonian daycare watch her child as she watched Booth.

She refused to tell Booth any stories beyond the ones they had already lived.

She would not speculate about their future.

Agent Danforth let the FBI techs examine the evidence under government microscopes and pronounced his own theory—smugglers, alerted to Booth and Sweets' presence, tried to slow down the investigation with an ambush, but failed. An APB had been issued for one Tom Bancroft, thought to be the brains behind the operation. His wife had been brought in for questioning and released.

Angela and Hodgins and Dr. Saroyan took their turns holding vigil with Dr. Brennan in the hospital. Max Keenan did his best to cajole both his daughter and grand daughter to eat and to sleep and to stimulate their senses with more than Booth's still form.

Jared came infrequently, prodded, it seemed, by Padme who understood why he didn't want to come and why he needed to.

Russ called. Dr. Brennan's nieces and sister-in-law talked to her, but the conversations, meant to draw her attention toward something else, toward life and possibilities, strained her and the girls.

Then there was Father Jimmy Cahill.

He'd made the mistake of coming to the hospital when Booth and Brennan had missed their appointment to discuss Christine's baptism and he'd run face-to-face with an avowed atheist and a comatose Catholic.

Toss in a rabbi and a Presbyterian minister, and Hodgins had been certain there might be a comedy routine somewhere in the meeting.

It wasn't quite the Apocalypse, but it wasn't quite as congenial as Booth might have hoped a meeting with the priest who would be conducting the baptism to be.

Two days.

Everyone held their collective breaths.

Booth had woken after five days, after brain surgery, after a bad reaction to the anesthesia. 

Everyone thought two was probably a lucky number. It was going to be the lucky day.

But it wasn't.

Two days slipped into three.

oOo

**Friday, 10:37 a.m.**

"Could you play that again?"

Was he really trying to understand the events as they unfolded that day, or was each re-viewing a chance for him to punish himself? Or exonerate himself? He couldn't really say.

"Are you sure, Sweets?"

He nodded deeply and Angela hesitated before pressing the remote.

The grainy image came to life again, the figures all moving in a pattern that never changed—first the two men moved into the frame, shadowed by two other men who kept vigil near a wall of crates before a shot rang out. Then everyone shifts, one man goes down, then another and another and another before the first man down springs back up again.

At the first shot, the clock starts and the numbers crash together until they pull apart and stop on the last shot: 7.2.

"I can keep playing it, but it's not going to change."

Someone discovered a security camera mounted high inside the warehouse and the 7-odd seconds are proof and guilt and innocence all rolled into one. Up until now, Angela's tone had been neutral, but he heard something in her last phrase, a commentary on his own starring role in the video.

"Even if I had seen the first man and drawn Booth's attention to him, the second man still has the drop on us."

Agent Danforth had called it a "no-win" for him and Booth. "Damned if you do warn him," he'd said. "The second shooter still has you two in his cross hairs."

"Could you play it again?"

This time Angela thrust the remote into his hands and pointed toward the button. "Knock yourself out, Sweets."

Something had shifted since the shooting. Agent Booth remained in the hospital and Dr. Brennan remained at his side, mostly, although the needs of the baby and the Jeffersonian continued to pull her away from her partner.

But something had shifted. When Agent Danforth had unearthed the security footage, he'd managed to get his own private showing at the Jeffersonian only because the FBI agent refused to let him see it and he had appealed to Angela. Now, in Angela's office, he'd seen the scene at least a dozen times and, well, something had changed in the viewing.

"Is there something wrong, Angela?"

With a wave of her hand and a tired shrug of her shoulders, she dismissed his question. "Seeing it a dozen more times doesn't change it."

There was that tone again. "Really? I get the feeling that this is more than me coming in to see the security tape."

He'd told himself he would take on everything and everyone head on. Face the music, man up, beard the lion. . . all the phrases he could dredge up to simply put things into perspective: he would take his lumps for what he did and did not do out in the field.

Never mind that Danforth had practically ignored him and that Dr. Brennan never raised any concern about what he'd not done at the machinist's shop. He knew he should have played a bigger role that day and that was enough of a burden for him.

He squared his shoulders and faced the artist. "Angela, if there's something you'd like to say to me, I'd like to hear it."

"No," she said too quickly, "you really don't want to hear it." She pulled the remote from his hands and punched a button turning off the display.

Before he could follow up, Dr. Saroyan appeared at the door. "Did Dr. Brennan drop Christine off here today?"

"At daycare?" Angela looked at her, something she had refused to do with him. "Yes, she dropped the baby off this morning. She said she would be in this afternoon."

"I need to talk to her now," Cam said. "Could you call her?" She looked at Sweets. "Dr. Sweets, I don't mean to be rude, but what are you doing here?"

Angela shrugged past him to retrieve her phone from her stool. "I'm just watching the video. . . ."

The explanation came out of his mouth, but his eyes were busy reading and processing the two women. Obviously neither one of them were welcoming his presence at the lab.

The two women did not move. They looked to be on pause as if they were waiting on him to leave.

"I guess I should go," he sputtered.

Dr. Saroyan's demeanor, cool and business-like, did not change.

He left.


	5. Starting again

**Saturday 8:02 a.m.**

"I'm sorry."

The words seemed to hit the wall that Dr. Brennan had put up and she screwed up her face in confusion.

He tried to elaborate. "For not doing more out in the field."

Again, the words seemed to collide with the wall and fall with a thud.

"I just, I just blame myself."

"You shot him?"

"No. . . wait, no. I didn't. . . no, it was like. . . you know, the video tape. . . wait, what makes you think I would shoot Booth?"

It was true—apologizing really was meant to help the apologist feel better. But apologizing to Dr. Brennan, well, he was sure that it was another level of hell in Dante's _Inferno_.

"I feel that I should have done more in the field to help Booth. I should have seen the shadow of the man. . . ."

He re-lived the entire experience, carefully reconstructing his guilt, explaining why he felt the need to apologize.

They'd been in this position before on opposite sides of something, caught in a misunderstanding and when he'd been wrong, he'd apologize.

He couldn't remember a time when she did. 

She seemed to be listening in that way she did when she seemed to be assessing his words almost in the same way he tried to gauge how well she was coping given everything that had been thrown at her this week.

He could tell that her defenses were up—they'd been up almost constantly and she seemed worn with the effort of maintaining the yo-yo-like schedule—hospital, hotel, hospital, hotel, hospital, hotel.

Angela and Max were providing support and helping to make sure that the baby was taken care of. If Christine knew of her mother's anguish, she didn't seem to show it. She burbled and smiled and her two-month-old brain seemed unable to process more than her needs to sleep, to eat and to have a clean, dry diaper.

Dr. Brennan, of course, was more complicated.

"From the surveillance video, Booth seems to have pushed you aside, so if you were able to draw your weapon and take a shot, it would have more than likely taken several seconds in which time the assailants were already incapacitated." She gave him that look, her professor look, the one that brooked no doubt, that so matter-of-fact look that defied argument. "As it was, you were unable to successfully draw your weapon. Since you were not trained to engage in shooting as part of a tandem, it is entirely possible that drawing and firing your weapon in close proximity to Booth might have drawn additional fire to yourself or to Booth, resulting in further injuries or even death to one or both of you."

He stared at her. Every contingency he'd anticipated had been erased with cool, hard Brennanite logic.

"Apologies are meant for the person who has been harmed." The look she gave him revealed just how tired she was. "If you should apologize to anyone, it would be to Booth, but I don't see why."

"I should have done more." He drew up and leveled his eyes with hers. "He saved my life."

"Yes."

Her eyes did not waver. Her interns and grad students might wither in this gaze, but he tried to hold on, show her his strength.

Then something occurred to him.

"You saw the tape." He leaned in. "When did you see the tape?"

"Yesterday at the lab." She speared a strawberry. "Dr. Saroyan called me in to examine the remains."

He'd felt the cool reception at the lab and the stiff arm he'd been getting from Danforth and hadn't really given the investigation much thought beyond the tape and his part in the case. No one seemed to want his insights and he'd given up to concentrate on his patients and his reports.

"I had to ask Angela to get a copy of the tape so I could see it." He'd felt like a small child asking for his parents' permission. "Danforth plays everything close to the vest."

He didn't know how to classify her reaction, but she seemed to drop her guard long enough for him to see just how little she thought of Danforth.

"I called Andrew about the investigation," she said as she brought the strawberry to her mouth. "He was concerned that it had seemingly stalled and that the lab wasn't being utilized." She paused, the strawberry hovering in mid-air. "We do have a success rate of 97 percent."

She bit into the strawberry, probably, he thought, in the same way she nibbled away at Assistant Deputy Director Hacker until he returned the evidence to the lab.

"Dr. Amling is having Booth moved to a private room this afternoon," she added.

"Wait." She was extremely adept at dropping bombshells and not seeing their effect on people. "Back up. You examined the remains? I thought the FBI pathologist was doing that."

That look again. He felt like a specimen under the microscope.

"The pathologist found a bone fragment that he couldn't account for," she said. "It belongs to a male in his early 30s."

"The husband?" His theory that the wife had stabbed the sister and the husband when she found them in bed together went back to the top of the list in his head. "Booth said he thought the husband was having an affair with the sister." He felt a surge of something—hope?—rekindle interest for the case in his head. "It's entirely possible that he was found with her by the sister and she stabbed them both and in the process a bit of his bone got mixed in with hers. You did say that it was a rage-filled attack."

"The bone fragment probably came from a black man."

He sat back. He hadn't expected that.

"How did the wife contact her husband?"

He tried to make sense of the question. "She texted him. He couldn't hear the ringtone at the shop, so she would leave him texts. They were working different shifts the last few days."

"Particulate evidence found in the body suggests that the victim was stabbed repeatedly while she lay in bed." Dr. Brennan pushed a sliver of melon around in her bowl. "The FBI technicians misidentified the particulates as pieces of her clothing, but Hodgins says that the fibers are more consistent with a mattress and linens."

"Why is it important how she contacted him?"

"Angela believes that the husband might have intercepted texts between the sister and her lover." She pursed her lips. "Phone records indicate that the sister texted the same number several times in the last few weeks. Apparently the three of them had similar cell phones and would often mistakenly pick up the others' phone." She set her fork down and sat back. "A family plan of some sort. I don't understand the significance."

But he did. The picture came into sharp focus.

"What if the husband is having an affair with the sister but she's seeing someone else?" He was warming to his story. "You said that the stabbing was done with rage, right? He sees a message on her phone from the lover, knows when they'll rendezvous and shows up, kills her, kills or wounds the lover and dumps the sister's body. But he can't go back home, so he runs."

She gave him a sour look, the one he always got when he engaged in rampant speculation. "Danforth's theory is that the husband might have been involved in the smuggling operation." The look did not change. "Although there is no evidence to suggest anyone in the machinist's shop knew the warehouse was being used to store smuggled goods." She pushed away her plate. "The owner told Danforth he didn't care what they were storing as long as they paid their rent on time."

"Smuggling?" He wanted his theory to be right so that he could take Danforth down a peg for all his smugness. "They had a warehouse of prescription drugs brought in from Mexico. The husband worked for the guy who leased the warehouse space in the back. He wasn't too picky about who he leased to—he needed the money and they were paying cash."

"Dr. Saroyan should have a toxicology report this afternoon," she said as she stood and placed a few bills on the table. "I should go. Christine will be up soon and they're moving Booth to a private room today."

It became his time to be thoughtful. Speculation streaked through the pictures forming in his mind and he knew just how resistant she could be to what she labeled guesswork.

"It's possible there was a fight. The husband was protecting the sister from an attack."

She made a face he couldn't read.

"Agent Danforth is meeting with Dr. Saroyan at the Hoover Building at 1 p.m. this afternoon." She paused, biting her lip. "She'll be providing him with hard evidence about the cause of death and the particulates. The FBI pathologist apparently could not determine cause of death." She hesitated and then turned. "I have to go."

He nodded and began to form a profile in his mind. Rage and jealousy fueled the attack which. . . . 

Then it dawned on him: Dr. Brennan had engineered a coup against Danforth and had put the team back on the case.

Including him.

"Wait," he said to her retreating back as she disappeared through the doors. He stood and tossed his napkin on the table as he strode quickly to follow her.

He caught up with her on the side street where she had parked her Prius. "Dr. Brennan," he gasped, "I know what you did here."

She gave him that look, the one he was sure she adopted only to draw out students and the slow, like himself.

"You wrestled the case back from Danforth to give us all a purpose. A focus." He took in a deep breath. "We really should be doing something for you."

He knew this look, too: the wall.

"Dr. Amling says the tests show no neurological damage to Booth's brain, he wasn't starved for oxygen. . . ."

"No." He wanted to hug her, offer something more than words, but she stiffened when he reached out and he withdrew his hand quickly. "Some comfort, some hope."

"Booth needs to wake up."

He couldn't offer anything better than that, but he began anyway. "He woke up after 5 days the last time," he offered. "He's healing well, they took the drain out. . . ."

He rambled on recounting all the medical milestones over the last several days, but he realized how fruitless his words were under her gaze and he stopped abruptly. She had already considered every detail and had cataloged it with everything else she knew about Booth.

For a moment they stood there in silence, the sounds of the street reminding them of other lives in motion while hers seemed at a standstill as she waited for her partner to return to her.

"Booth needs to wake up," he conceded.

She nodded stiffly and he watched as she crossed into the street to the driver's side and heard the beep as she opened the door.

He stood watching as she drove off, the hybrid car more silent than her pain.

"Booth wake up," he repeated.

oOo

**Saturday, 11:17 p.m.**

She collapsed on him, gasping for breath as he felt his own heart thundering in his chest.

"Oh, my Lancelot," she cooed between gasps. "Oh, God, that was. . . oh, wow."

He shifted beneath her and felt the exposed flesh, still damp from the exertion, chill slightly.

"God, Daisy. . . ."

Sex still had the power to transport him well beyond this world into another and he relished the sweet oblivion.

With a grunt she peeled herself from him and he felt her loss as he pulled a sheet over himself. He listened as she padded into the bathroom and he heard the water running and he allowed the blessed gray area of his brain to remain fallow as his breathing slowed.

"You were incredible, Daisy. Simply incredible," he called out to her. "I like that little thing you did at the end there. . . ."

He liked everything she did, really. Everything that transported him to someplace other than this place offered sweet, sweet relief.

"Do you think Dr. Brennan is going to take a leave of absence?"

And the relief was gone.

Poised with a toothbrush in hand and her robe half open revealing the delights he's just sampled before, he had more than half a mind to simply pull her back into bed and lose himself in her again.

"I mean, if Agent Booth doesn't wake up from his coma, do you think she'll take a leave of absence so she could spend all of her time with him?" The question had turned her own body into an exclamation point. "Or would she put him in a nursing facility and visit him regularly?"

Sighing, he twisted away from her to retrieve his underwear from the floor. "I don't know, Daisy," he said, grunting as he pulled his pants on. "The doctors say there's every reason to believe he can make a full recovery and wake up at any time."

"Well, they don't really know why he's in a coma now, do they?" she countered, her toothbrush poised in the air between them. "The last time he was in a coma, he had had brain surgery and they thought that that might have caused him to become comatose, but it might just be that his body has some kind of aversion to the anesthesia and given the fact that he was in surgery twice in one day it's entirely possible that he could be in a coma for twice as long as he was before."

"I don't know, Daisy." He sat down heavily on the bed. "I just don't know."

"Well, Dr. Brennan doesn't blame you for what happened, does she?" The hand with the toothbrush went to her hip and the robe flared open and in the half light of the bedroom he wondered if this was meant to be some kind of torture. "She knows that the way that Agent Booth pushed you out of the way, you had no opportunity to draw your weapon and fire."

If he had found some relief from his own demons, they came back screaming in triumph.

"She's seen the surveillance tape."

"It's just so sad, you know." She slumped onto the bed and gave him a sympathetic look. "I just don't know what I would do if you had been shot." Then she shot up from the bed. "You were lucky you didn't draw their fire. I just don't know how I would cope if you had been shot or killed."

Her voice had settled into a somber whine. "I know I should feel sad for Agent Booth and for Dr. Brennan, but I can't help but be happy that my Lancelot wasn't injured."

Something broke inside him and he couldn't contain it any longer. "Don't you see, Daisy? I should have been shot. I would have been shot but Booth just pushed me out of the way and shielded me like he didn't believe I could protect myself. Or him."

He rose from the bed. "I should have done something. I should have. I didn't react fast enough. But Booth did." He took in a deep breath to fuel his pain. "And now he's lying there in that hospital bed and we don't know if he's ever going to wake up and people are speculating on whether Dr. Brennan is going to give up her career to nurse him and I feel like I let him down. Like I let everyone down. And I was so sure that I could provide him backup in the field. That I could shoot someone if I had to and all I did was lay there on the ground happy that I wasn't shot, that I wasn't injured."

"I'm relieved it wasn't me."

He'd pulled his shirt and pants from the chair and tried to remember what he wanted with them.

"Oh, my Lancelot. . . ," Daisy began to walk toward him but he held up his hands and she stopped.

"No, Daisy. No. I. . . I keep replaying that whole day over and over and I can't see how I got out of there without a scratch and how I can come back here and have sex and carry on my life and know it could have been me, it should have been me. And I'm glad that it isn't. I see how much pain Dr. Brennan is in and I. . . ." He collapsed onto the bed, tears pricking his eyes. "I'm just glad that I wasn't shot. That you don't have to find out how horrible it is to be in her shoes right now. And I feel terrible and I also feel glad."

"I'm just so glad it wasn't me."

He closed his eyes and felt Daisy's body leaning against his, her hands cradling his head, his tears unshed.

oOo

**Sunday, 9:03 a.m.**

One day slipped into another but the Hoover's offices didn't know it was Sunday. Agents dotted the bullpen as he made his way to his own office, but their presence barely registered with him.

He'd take care of some correspondence, finish a profile, read through some files before meeting Daisy for lunch.

Life went on.

He would tell his patients the same thing—they could not become mired in what ifs. Guilt and shame only served as anchors to weigh a person down.

Life went on.

He might stop in to check on Booth's progress later that afternoon, see if Dr. Brennan needed anything, but if he knew her and her friends and family, everything would be well in hand.

His life had to go on. He'd made a mistake and revisiting it like a rerun of a bad reality TV show only perpetuated the agony. He wasn't being insensitive—far from it. Pragmatic. Logical. Both qualities Dr. Brennan appreciated; both qualities that were helping her get through this difficult time.

It would have to work for him, too.

Halfway into the profile on a bank robbery suspect for an agent in Little Rock, he noticed a shadow across the pad of paper in his lap and he looked up.

"Survivor's guilt."

Agent Matthew Danforth hovered at the doorway, his arms crossed in front of him.

"What?"

"Survivor's guilt, Doc." Danforth leaned in. "Ever hear of it?"

Sweets wished he had Booth's desk of doodads and whatsits so that he could find something to throw at the agent.

"Ever hear of knocking?"

Danforth stepped further into the room and rounded the couch before plopping down on it. "Are all of you associated with the Jeffersonian and Booth's little army such pains in the ass?"

"Is this a game of 20 questions?"

"First one to hit twenty wins," Danforth said and then slapped his leg. "I guess I blinked first and lost."

"Is there a reason for this visit?"

Danforth tested the back of the couch by leaning heavily into it. "Talking to Dr. Brennan, who, by the way, is a royal pain in the ass, I've come to see that my earlier theory about what happened at your little gunfight might have had something to do with a smuggling operation, but everything leading up to that had to do with the murder."

"What?"

Danforth scratched at a spot above his ear. "Look, Doc, I concede. You win. The Jeffersonian wonks win. I'm sworn to uphold the law and in order to do that, I need to solve this murder. In order to do that, I need you. I just want your help on a little something and then you can go back to your report."

"What are you talking about?" Sweets stared at the man. He couldn't decide if Danforth was an idiot or just an ass. "Every time I have offered to help, you've shut me out. But I have some vital skill _now_ that you need?"

"Look," Danforth began, "it used to be that murder investigations needed just a medical examiner and a good cop to figure things out. But now we use bug guys to determine the when and pathologists to determine the what and psychologists to determine the why. And if that's not good enough, we throw in blood spatter experts and weapons specialists and someone to pare it all down to the very bones. It's a team effort and sometimes you need to re-pick your team."

"Thank you for that lesson." Sweets shifted in his seat. "I have a lot of work to do."

"If the thing isn't working, then you have to move onto something that does." Danforth's tone almost sounded conciliatory. "There's a reason why Booth's team has a success rate of 96%."

"Ninety-seven percent," he corrected.

"All right, 97%." He leaned forward, his knees wide and his hands clasped together. "I want to solve this murder. The smuggler's got nothing on the girl's death and so I'm starting from scratch again and I want to go at the wife." 

Alarm bells went off in Sweets' head. "She didn't have anything to do with the murder," he said. "She's got an airtight alibi. She was presenting at a nurse's conference. Hard to argue with 100 other nurses."

"Agreed," said Danforth. "But she knows where the husband might hole up and I need your help getting the information from her. Stevers is at some birthing center with his wife who's about ready to pop out another cop's kid."

"Cop's kid?"

"Cops shouldn't have kids. Neither should teachers. Makes for touching movie-of-the-week crap, but mostly they don't know how to raise kids."

Sweets decided quickly. "You're an ass."

"So I fit right in." He squinted at him. "I did tell you that your Dr. Brennan's a royal pain, didn't I? Likes justice. Turns out, so do I."

"So ask the wife." He really didn't like the man. "Bring her here, though." He began to piece together how the interview should go. "You'll want to put her in the conference room. Make her feel like she's part of the investigation. She's probably pieced together the scenario by now, husband disappears after her sister's murdered and from how I read her, she'll want justice."

"You've got a read on her," Danforth grimaced as he spoke. "That's why I need your help."


	6. Sunday, a new day

**Sunday, 11:43 p.m.**

"You brought it, didn't you?"

Almost thirty miles of silence and Agent Danforth began his inane 20-question game again. Sweets ignored him; he'd learned something from Brennan and Booth over the years.

"You brought it? The gun, right?"

Sweets felt the bulge at his hip, the pistol nestled in its holster which he had worn despite his betrayal of it and for what it had once stood.

"I brought my gun."

"Good."

He could wait another 30 miles for the agent to speak or he could ask.

He asked; apparently he hadn't learned enough from the cop and the scientist he with which he usually spent time.

"Why, if you think a shrink shouldn't have a gun, is it good that I brought it with me?"

"Survivor's guilt," Danforth said.

Sweets stared out the window. He suddenly understood Booth's urge to shoot people.

Danforth had needed his help. He had all the charm of a rabid dog and had left him to question the wife. All right—he'd blackmailed Danforth. The story of how Brennan had blackmailed Booth into taking her into the field had resonated with him and he'd used the same formula to force Danforth to take him into the field: _I'll help with the wife if you take me out into the field._ After twenty minutes they had a solid lead on a hiding spot for the husband, a cabin in West Virginia. A phone call to Daisy to cancel their lunch and another to the hospital to check on Booth and he'd joined the agent on what had been mostly a silent ride highlighted by twisting roads the moment they hit the Mountain State.

"I admit that I have a bit of survivor's guilt," Sweets offered. "But what does that have to do with the gun? I would think you wouldn't want me carrying a weapon."

"Doc, I'd much rather you were carrying. This guy, if we find him, has been holed up for most of a week. We don't know what kind of condition he's in or what kinds of weapons he's got. Hell, we don't even know if he's alone."

"So you want me to carry for what? To prove something?"

"To get back on the horse." Danforth scowled as the road snaked down and then made a sharp retreat upward. "I don't know the psychological term for it and I don't really care. I just know that you need to know that there wasn't much you could do in that situation Tuesday. Booth made a judgment call and decided he was in a better position to take out the two gunmen. You don't know if you could have pulled your gun much less pulled the trigger and that's eating at you."

"When we leave this vehicle, you will draw your weapon and safety it. No need to shoot off your damned foot if you trip."

Sweets wanted to go back to the silence.

"We're going to stop a couple miles from the cabin and we are going to put on our Kevlar vests," Danforth added. "Radios, too, if the mountains don't bounce our signal. My case, my rules. I might have to deal with you pains in the ass, but I don't have to jeopardize lives in the process."

Sweets' head bobbed up and down in agreement, the weight of this trip beginning to settle in his stomach like cement donuts.

"I'm going in on foot to see if our suspect is in the cabin. You will stay by the SUV and you will not move until I tell you to. Once we've established that he is in the cabin, I will try to persuade him to leave. You will remain at the SUV."

"This is technically taking me out in to the field, but I'm not going to do anything but stay at the car?"

"Right."

"So this is not some kind of exercise designed to make me feel better."

"Not really." Danforth seemed to be enjoying himself. "No."

"So what was all that? Back there?"

"Sisyphus." Danforth was enjoying himself. "Rolled the damn rock up the hill only to have it roll down again so he had to constantly roll it right back up again. Greeks had lots of damned clever ways of punishing people. Thirsty people with their mouths sewn shut."

"So this is my punishment?"

"Actually," Danforth muttered, "I see this whole case as my punishment."

Sweets stared ahead sure this wasn't how things were supposed to go.

"You have to set the parameters better," Danforth said. "Like your Dr. Brennan. She made it perfectly clear how the lab should be utilized and she brought in that Dr. Saroyan as back-up. Pretty compelling case. My parameters are these—you stay by the car. If Bancroft gets past me, shoot him. Or, at the very least, protect yourself." He glanced toward him; Sweets swore he could feel the man's mocking gaze. "And if you can, Doc, look at the map and find us a straighter road in this damned state."

oOo

**Sunday, 1:37 p.m.**

He stood outside the SUV feeling the waves of heat radiate off the black paint. The Kevlar vest, meant to save his midsection in the event of a gunfight, chafed at the waist and he felt a trickle of sweat join the puddle at the small of his back.

He wasn't built for this.

True to his word, Danforth had stopped the SUV two miles from the cabin and cinched him up in a bullet-proof vest before making the last leg of the journey. He'd made another stop a half mile from their target, threw a radio at him and took off on foot "to see what I can see."

And he had waited. The woods surrounding the cabin shrouded the road and footpaths and spared them the full strength of the sun, but it also felt disorienting under the canopy of trees.

No, strike that, he thought. He felt exposed.

Danforth had explained everything with a military-like demeanor and Sweets guessed he had served in the Marines before hitching his star to the FBI. The half hour he'd already waited on Danforth was fraught with concern as each noise seemed to amplify his own fears.

The agent was doing the dangerous reconnaissance work testing the edges of the woods around the cabin for signs of life. He, on the other hand, was merely the guy standing by the SUV, the door open, one hand wrapped around his gun, the other around the radio and his head wrapped around a different kind of puzzle.

Who should he thank for Danforth's change of heart: Hacker or Brennan or the man himself?

The snap of a branch to his left tipped the scales toward Danforth who had seemed to relish scaring him and reassuring him in the same sentence.

A light breeze kicked up and the woods around him came to life in a shivery dance of leaves that rustled all around him.

"Maybe we should just leave this guy out here," Sweets thought. "We don't even know if he's guilty of anything."

Another snap of a branch drew his attention away from the SUV and from the path Danforth had taken.

Another snap.

Then something so loud he knew it could only be one thing. . . .

He pushed at the button on the radio and pulled up the gun to level it in the direction of the gunshot and waited.

Only the woods around him answered.

Shoving the radio in his pocket, he twisted the earpiece in place and whispered loudly, "Danforth?"

He repeated the agent's name and felt the weight of the keys in his pocket and wondered if he should drive in or drive off when another gunshot decided for him. He hit the call button on his phone and recited the all-too-familiar message, "Gunshots fired. Agent Matthew Danforth and Dr. Lance Sweets on scene. . . ."

He made the full report to the dispatcher, his voice steady and clear. "Agent Danforth is not responding on the radio. We may have a bad connection but this is Dr. Sweets and I am going to approach the cabin."

That last part sounded like a bad B movie line, but the robotic reply from the dispatcher reassured him that he was doing something within the range of what was expected and he tucked his phone into his pocket and began jogging toward the cabin.

Danforth had told him to stick close to the trees and he tried, but when the roots of one tree gnarled up and almost tripped him, he darted behind the tree and began crashing through the brush.

He made another swing around the trees, back to the road and darted across it to another stand of trees that he thought might give him a better angle on the cabin.

What he got was a better view of Danforth.

It looked like Danforth, the stand of graying hair at one end of a lump of black cloth. At the other was a man, with what looked like a pistol, standing over the lump, the barrel pointed carelessly skyward.

"FBI," Sweets shouted as he took a kneeling position behind a tree to make himself a smaller target, "drop your weapon."

The line of the pistol shifted, pointing toward him, but he held steady, his voice no-nonsense, hard as steel, the tree his new best friend. "FBI, drop that gun or I will shoot you where you stand."

The man wavered, then backed away, the gun still pointed in his direction.

"Charlie," Sweets half-shouted, "flank him on the left. Baker, take the right."

It was stupid, he knew, but Danforth didn't have the good sense to keep still, the lump twitched and Sweets was sure that Bancroft might begin shooting again to quiet them.

"Drop your gun or they will come in here and take it from you," Sweets shouted. "You've got three seconds."

This was colossally stupid. "One." He began praying for a deer to crash through the woods. Two deer. One on the left, one on the right. He flipped off the safety.

"Two." He reminded himself that Danforth could easily be killed in the crossfire as he slid his finger to the trigger. The lump of cloth seemed to have settled down but he knew this was bad.

"Three."

It wasn't his voice. Danforth had come in from nowhere and was pointing his gun at the suspect's head as he reached for the weapon in Bancroft's hand.

The lump of black cloth was just that—a lump of black cloth. Only the dappled light had given it the suggestion of the agent's prone body.

Danforth held the gun steady on Bancroft's head as tucked the extra weapon into his holster then reached for his cuffs.

"Okay if I cuff him, Doc?" he called to him. "Or do you want to let Charlie do it?"

oOo

**Sunday, 7:53 p.m.  
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"You've seen too many John Wayne movies, Sweets," said Hodgins as he slapped him on the back. "_Drop that gun or I will shoot you where you stand, pilgrim_." The entomologist gave him a look of approval. "Murderers beware, with a gun in his hand, our Sweets isn't nearly so sweet."

He studied his hands sheepishly and collected the good-natured jabs to be played back later when he had some time to process everything that had happened.

Cornered, Bancroft had crumpled to the ground, his hands raised in a testament to a different version of survivor's guilt. The black man who had fled in terror at the knife attack, his own wounds no match for his fear.

Or shame, perhaps, at learning he had left her to die.

Caroline Julian had suggested if the evidence bore out, Bancroft would face at least 20 years for the murder and the mayhem on a federal officer. "He isn't the first person who wanted to take a shot at Danforth," she quipped. "But Danforth works for the FBI so I have to charge him with the crime."

The drive back to Washington had been filled with a chorus of grunts from Danforth who had been all-too happy to drop off Bancroft with the locals then take his place behind the wheel for the trek home. Sweets fully understood the meaning of being in the driver's seat.

But he hadn't expected a hospital lounge to be a place of celebration for one of their cases.

"You did a 97% job, Doc," said Danforth as he eyed him over a coffee cup. "Always some wiggle room for improvement."

He nodded in acknowledgement, uncertain just how he should read the man's words.

Caroline's sigh announced she was going. "This place just depresses me," she said.

Looking at the others, Sweets really couldn't disagree.

"There's a reason why we usually go to a bar to celebrate the end of one of these," Caroline said. "Drink enough and it's easy to forget." She looked with distaste at the contents of her coffee cup. "Sipping this bilge water is apt to make you wonder if the hospital just sells it to keep up a steady volume of patients." Dropping the cup in the nearest wastebasket, he could see a splash of the brown liquid cresting over the cup's lip as she sketched a wave and headed down the hall toward the elevators.

Danforth groaned to his full height, stretched, then grumbled something and moved to follow her.

His coffee cup was empty.

"Damned fool move." He grunted.

Sweets wasn't sure if it was a commentary on his actions or Danforth's trickery in the field. He wasn't sure if he even needed to know as he watched the man saunter down the hall.

Without the attorney or the agent, the lounge became eerily quiet.

"Danforth needed us to crack this case," Hodgins said. He looked toward his wife and shrugged. "It's good to go out with one in the win column."

"It's not quite a win, yet, babe," Angela countered. "The evidence is pretty thin according to Caroline."

"We'll get it," Cam offered. "We usually do."

But they fell into silence and Sweets heard the lack of confidence echo in his head.

"He woke after five days the last time," Sweets said hopefully. Giving voice to the rather large elephant in the room seemed to be another act of bravery in a day filled with acts. "He'll wake up."

No one really met his eyes.

"The doctors said that there's nothing wrong with his brain. It's probably a bad reaction to the anesthesia like last time." He couldn't stop the train of words running. "He had two operations in one day, so by rights he should be out for twice as long, ten days. By that time he'll mostly be healed and he can go home and. . . ."

"Sweets, are you all right?"

He felt the tears pricking his eyes again at Angela's words. For a moment, the briefest of moments, he had felt all right and then the reality hit him and he was caught in his own loop of guilt and doubt again.

"Yeah," he said quickly. "I just don't think we should give up hope. He's a strong man and he's got everything to live for. He's got a daughter and his son, Parker. . . and Dr. Brennan. He's got her. I know we all kind of doubted. . . ."

The train was barreling out of control.

"Dr. Sweets?" Dr. Saroyan stood in front of him, commanding his attention. "Whatever the outcome," she said, glancing back at Angela and Hodgins who were standing together next to the couch, "Dr. Brennan has indicated she doesn't want to solve murders anymore. She wants to return to pure science."

The train crashed.

He crumpled to the coffee table. Angela and Hodgins both looked at the floor.

"She's asked for a leave of absence," Dr. Saroyan continued. "It's open-ended for now. She's recommended Dr. Edison as her replacement." She sighed and when he glanced up he saw just how frayed she was by the development. "The board is going to study if they want to continue running the lab without her. There's some talk that they would dismantle the Medico-Legal Lab and end our association with the FBI."

"They can't," he protested.

But they had once before. Stainless steel tables and electron microscopes had been replaced by a mastodon and a whole pictorial timeline of the Ice Age. The recent dead had been replaced by the ancient dead and he began to feel the weight of everything pressing down on him.

History had a way of repeating itself, he thought as he tried to understand everything. Comas and dreams converged and ghosts of abandonment and interminable waits in hospitals had taken their toll and Dr. Brennan, who seemed solid had been broken by seismic waves of emotions. She'd really been shaken to the very core by the shooting. And the coma. And the loss.

She could untangle random acts of savagery and violence and bring closure to others, but when the violence came home to her, or the emotions too overwhelming, she no longer had walls to keep it out. The feelings invaded every corner and threatened to overwhelm her and she was retreating to the safety of science.

"I could talk to her," he suggested.

But he knew the only solution lay miles away in a hospital bed just a few steps down the hallway.

Only Booth could talk to her.

Only Booth.


	7. Final curtain

**Monday, 10:05 a.m.**

He'd woken that morning and shaved and dressed and eaten and barely thought about it until he did.

Then he couldn't not think about it.

That's how the mind worked, he reminded himself. Try not to think about something and the only thing you could think about would be that thing.

Booth and Brennan.

They'd staged a celebration in the lounge for her benefit, to give her hope, but it had really been for themselves. Dr. Brennan had nodded and hugged them and taken it all in, but they could see just how false their celebration had been.

It felt more like goodbye.

Now he seemed to be struggling through his reports, struggling through the routine. Uncertainty ruled the day and he wondered just how long it might take for him to feel certain of anything again.

It hadn't helped that Danforth had re-entered his life and his office, intent on ruining a perfectly ruined day.

"Been checking all the hospitals and emergency rooms for a black male who fits the description of our runner," Danforth said as a way of greeting him as he waltzed into his office. "No one's come in with stab wounds as severe as your people say they'll be."

He hadn't slept well—Daisy had retreated to her apartment to finish a paper she was working on and he had tossed alone in bed until he'd finally managed a couple of hours of sleep. Danforth was as good as a nightmare.

"So you can't find the other victim," Sweets repeated. "Could be dead somewhere. Just how am I connected to this problem?"

"Loose ends, Doc," Danforth said as he slid into a seat on the couch, his posture not much different than yesterday's takeover. "Bancroft claims it was the other guy who did the stabbing and without a reliable witness, he's making a compelling case. Doctors tell me his wounds are consistent with a defensive struggle. He gets cut, gets scared and hightails it out of there because he's in no hurry to rescue his sister-in-law because he's playing hide the sau. . . ."

"I get the picture," Sweets said, his voice testy and his mood testier. "I can give you an idea of what kind of man might. . . ."

"Not looking for a mental picture, Doc," Danforth interrupted. "I'm looking for insights on what to look for physically."

It took a second, but the picture came into focus. "You want to ask Dr. Brennan to help you pick out the victim."

Danforth looked stunned and for one shining moment Sweets felt he had a handle on his day.

"I'm not going to ask how you got from point A to Z so quickly," Danforth said slowly. "But without more evidence, I can't hold Bancroft for too long. Charge him with leaving the scene, failure to report, that sort of thing. Minor on the face of it, really."

"I thought I was bad luck, Agent Danforth. I thought two agents shot in two separate incidents in which I played a part. . . ." Sweets felt the anger swelling.

"That's a might strong. . . ."

"And you don't like civilians in the field. You don't like Dr. Brennan. . . ."

"There's a time and a place for. . . ."

"And the Jeffersonian team is Booth's team and God help you but you really don't like to work with them because they really are loyal to a different agent."

"Everyone screws with the substitute teacher. . . ."

"And when we give you good advice, sterling advice, you ignore it and go ahead blithely. . . ."

"Stop."

Danforth was standing, his hands raised in surrender. "Yes, Dr. Sweets, I have opinions about civilians in the field and I have opinions about two separate incidences involving you." He looked absolutely feral. "I admit to having doubts about you in the field, such that I set up a ruse to lure the suspect from the cabin to avoid loss of life and limb. Even was willing to call in the locals to flush him out, if need be. Thing is, Doc, criminals aren't necessarily the sharpest knives in the drawer. You or me or both of us could have been killed out there yesterday. I did what I did to minimize risk. That's what a good agent does."

"But this is a murder, and I need the sharpest minds possible."

"You need the team at the Jeffersonian."

Danforth looked grim. "Yeah. I need them. And I need Dr. Brennan."

"But she won't work with you."

Sweets felt more and more in control.

"She won't work with anyone right now." Danforth began to slowly shake his head. "Your bone doctor has severe trust issues that probably mean that even if we solve this case, she's not going to throw in her lot with me. Or any agent."

"But Lisa Knowles believed in two things—having a good time and working just to keep the party going. Doesn't matter if she slept with the whole House of Reps or the President himself, she deserves justice, but that hasn't always been the focus of this case, has it?"

Danforth's words struck a note with Sweets.

"It's been about ego and pride and fear, not Lisa Knowles." Danforth closed his eyes and sighed heavily. "Her death was about greed or power or sex—I just don't know. I don't have a real clear picture of this and without something more to pull it into focus, Lisa Knowles just gets to fade into some distant memory, mourned and forgotten because other things got in the way."

For the first time since he began his unlikely association with the agent, Sweets felt as if they just might be on the same side.

"If you want Dr. Brennan's help," Sweets said slowly and deliberately, "try some of that honesty with her. She likes the truth."

Danforth's expression did not change.

"Problem is, Doc, that little speech was hers, not mine." The man looked positively uncertain of himself. "I need new material."

oOo

**Monday, 2:57 p.m.**

If this was the end of the dream team, Sweets thought, it would have one of those bittersweet happy endings.

The large monitors of Angela's computer flashed with images as the artist prodded her controller. Everyone had agreed to give this one last try—comb through the evidence which they hadn't necessarily had a hand in collecting and make something out of the nothing they seemed to be left holding.

"Triangulate old cell phone calls?" Danforth stared at the screens, his eyes trying to read the flood of images. "I hadn't thought of that."

"I can give you the nearest cell towers." Angela said. Her eyes scanned the screens. "You'll have to figure out what they're close to."

"I appreciate this," Danforth said. "I need the numbers I indicated. There were a lot of calls to that number and it had to be something."

He caught Angela's eyes as they both stared at the agent. The man was casting his line and hoping something jumped at the bait.

"Brennan's looking at the bones now," she added. "If Wendell missed something, she'll catch it."

Danforth said nothing, simply looked forward.

He wasn't about to jinx his luck.

He'd accompanied the agent to the hospital and together they made his case to Dr. Brennan. Sweets hadn't been able to read her; she'd been reading something to Booth as they walked in and it wasn't until later that he realized she had been reading something she was writing to him—a new novel, maybe.

For several minutes he had listened, the story a compelling mixture of characters both familiar and unfamiliar, but none he recognized from her novels. This was a different story designed maybe to have a different ending.

Sweets hadn't commented on it at the time—he felt that they were asking too much of her as it was, but she had relented and Danforth had driven her to the Jeffersonian and taken a back seat as she explained the need for them all to re-examine evidence.

He watched the kaleidoscope of images coalesce into one and the map appeared to pinpoint a large area of the D.C. area.

"It was a disposable cell phone," Danforth murmured. "But who the hell were you calling?"

"I can't answer that," Hodgins said as he entered the room, "but I can tell you that the fibers in the mattress were the kind that are used to prevent or deter infection from spreading. It's a special blend treated to repel germs and viruses. It's being tested in hospitals."

"Do you know which ones?"

Hodgins grinned at the agent's question. "Right here in D.C." He pointed toward a spot within the circle around one of the cell phone towers on Angela's diagram. "It's being tested at Little Company of Hope."

"The same hospital in which our victim's sister works," Dr. Saroyan added.

"Quite a coincidence," Angela said.

"As Dr. B says," Hodgins offered, "there are no coincidences in murder investigations."

Danforth blinked at the screen. 

All heads turned as Dr. Brennan strode into the room. "The microfractures on Lisa Knowles' wrists were more than likely caused by struggling against a hard restraint."

"You can tell that?" Danforth's voice rose. "From looking at the bones?"

Dr. Brennan ignored the comment and took the controller from Angela and pressed a few areas on the pad. An enlargement of the wrist bones appeared to show tiny fissures that radiated out from the nearest points. Then the screen changed.

They saw a profile of bone that had been cleaved in two.

"The striations and force profile of the murder weapon did not fit any of the profiles of weapons in our database," she said. "That's why Wendell didn't find any matches."

"We don't know where she was killed or even why or with what." Danforth grunted. "More dead ends."

"Not quite," Dr. Brennan said. The images on the screen changed and a cutting tool with an unusual shape appeared on the screen. "Reverse engineering the wound marks gives us a weapon like this. This is what caused the marks on Lisa Knowles' bones."

"That?" Danforth stepped closer to the screen. "What the hell is it?"

Next to the weapon circled in red were Chinese knives and an assortment of knives most often found at the weekend flea markets. Each knife looked more murderous, more deadly than the next, but the murder weapon looked almost dainty besides the others. The business end had a rounded surface that seemed more like something from an umbrella and a sharpened point that tapered into a smooth, deadly edge. Serrations along the blade were irregularly spaced as if some kind of afterthought.

In all, it didn't look like a murder weapon at all.

"Something a machinist could make," Angela supplied. "A murder weapon that could not be traced to any known design in our current database."

"Don't you see what they've done," Hodgins added, "with her murder? One red herring after the next."

Danforth wasn't buying it. "We already eliminated the biggest red herring, the smuggling operation, from the murder."

"They planned this," Dr. Brennan interjected. "It would take some time to come up with the murder weapon, but someone had to design it and then make it. And a hospital would be an ideal place to stage the murder, especially a murder such as this. There would be copious amounts of blood. Both the victim and the killer would be covered with it"

"Wait," Danforth cautioned, but no one was listening.

"This was especially bloody." Dr. Saroyan was adding to the fray. She listed a number of arteries that would have been severed in the attack. "Blood spurts would be hard to clean up. . . ."

"Except in a facility that regularly has copious amounts of blood such as a hospital," Dr. Brennan said, pointing toward a new image on the monitor of Little Company of Hope. "If I were the murderers, I would choose a surgery."

"The blood could be explained. . . ," said Dr. Saroyan.

"Better yet, disposed of," Angela countered. "Along with all the linens and bedclothes. . . ."

"Incinerated at 780 – 1200 Celsius," Dr. Brennan continued.

"1436 to 2552 Fahrenheit," Hodgins translated. He gave a nod toward Danforth.

"With the rest of the medical waste. And the bone fragment could have been taken from a surgical procedure," Dr. Brennan suggested. "There were no discernible blood traces from another victim despite the savagery of the attack on Miss Knowles. It's quite possible it was harvested from a surgery and used to throw suspicion from Tom Bancroft to an unknown, black male in his early thirties."

"And the serrations or marks or what have you on the bone doesn't match the whatsit murder weapon we have now," Danforth offered.

"No, it matches." Dr. Brennan pressed another button and a fragment appeared on the screen with lines drawn between it and the rib bones that matched the profile of the murder weapon. "But they had the weapon. It wouldn't be that hard to use their knife on this bone."

"A conspiracy to commit murder," Hodgins said, warming to the story. "It fits. Who better to accuse of murder in D.C. but a whole group of people who are comprise a large segment of the prison population as it is. It's like that case where the mother drowned her children and claimed that they were attacked by a black male. How many police departments were scouring the area for that man before the truth came out?"

"She was manipulating the paranoia of the general population."

"And when the bone fragment is added to the body of the victim, it creates reasonable doubt that someone else was in that bed with her." Sweets saw the big picture coming into focus. "Tom Bancroft catches wind of the prescription drugs being warehoused at the shop and gets involved selling them at the hospital through his wife. When the sister finds out and maybe wants her fair share, they decide to kill the sister because she knows about it. Or she's already in on it."

"Patients look for less expensive alternatives to their medications," Dr. Saroyan mused. "A pharmacist could substitute lower quality drugs for the higher quality ones and still dispense them at the same price, then sell the higher quality drugs on the street."

"Lisa Knowles stumbles into what her sister and brother-in-law are doing, and. . . ."

"STOP!"

Agent Danforth stood between them and Angela's monitors, his hands raised and his face dark with the exertion.

No one moved. All eyes were on the agent as he tried to digest what they were saying.

Angela openly smirked while Hodgins grinned and Dr. Saroyan seemed to be suppressing her own smile. Only Dr. Brennan remained serious, her expression almost neutral even though her eyes seemed to be assessing the man in front of her.

"All right," he said finally. "All right. He did it. And she did it. And we know how they did it and probably why they did it." He turned toward Dr. Brennan. "He did it, right?"

"The force of the stab wounds with a weapon of this ilk would require a . . . ."

He held up his hand, stopping her. "He did it. _They_ did it." He took a deep breath. "You all are going to run through this with me, _one at a time_, and I'm going to need to get warrants for the machine shop and the hospital and then I'm going out to arrest someone." He gave them each a long, thoughtful look. "We're going to build the story. . . ."

"This isn't a story," Dr. Brennan protested. "The evidence supports what we've been saying."

With her arms crossed, she seemed as intractable as Danforth.

"I appreciate your help, Dr. Brennan, I really do," he began slowly, "but right now it's a story. Then we try to see what evidence we have to fit that story."

"That's not how we work," Dr. Saroyan interjected. Her own posture mimicked Dr. Brennan's. "We don't adapt the evidence to a story of what we think happened. This is the only plausible way it could have happened."

Neither she nor Dr. Brennena were budging.

So Danforth blinked first.

"_Please_ take me through the accumulated evidence," he said slowly, deliberately, his voice scrubbed of all sarcasm. "_Please_ help me understand what the Bancrofts did and why they did it. Then I can get additional information through warrants and I can go out and arrest the SOB who did this."

Sweets cringed at the word, _why_, but he said nothing because Dr. Brennan said nothing. She only nodded and the evidence was laid out, piece by piece as Bancroft listened and asked questions.

Throughout the explanations, he watched Dr. Brennan, her demeanor cool and detached. And he watched Danforth and as he did, he realized there was only one way for this to end.

oOo

**Monday, 5:35 p.m. **

"You really didn't have to come with me, Doc."

The entrance to the hospital betrayed its beginnings at the turn of the last century, its Victorian influences evident in the old brickwork and ornate style. Inside, the old gave way to the new and only remnants of the original architecture showed through the modern lobby.

"Dr. Brennan insisted that we have a forensic team examine the surgical wing and look at the logs for the incinerator." Sweets felt he had to stay firmly in command of this part of the operation. "She didn't have to oversee it, but she chose to. The least I could do was to see the rest of this through."

"You could have another go at the husband. Present him with the new evidence." Danforth stabbed at the elevator button again. "If what you say is true, then it's possible he might flip on the wife."

Even if Danforth was a first-class ass, he was still a decent detective who wasn't content with simply laying the blame on an unknown assailant, thought Sweets. He wanted the truth and he was willing to unleash a team of forensic specialists to search for anything that would point the finger at the murderer.

"Hodgins has a team at the machinist's shop. If they can find the same kind of metal that was used in the knife. . . ."

"Game, set, match." Danforth drummed his fingers against the wall before turning to him. "Look, Dr. Sweets, this job is a lot about trust. Your Dr. Brennan trusts Booth and you trust him and it's a regularly trust festival. Hacker wants your 97 percent to keep his badge shiny, but the truth is that trust has to be earned. That's how the 97 percent stays there."

"She didn't have to come, you know," Danforth said as the elevator came to a rest in front of them. "Cops in the field. Scientists in the lab. That's the way of the world."

"Your world," Sweets said. "But in her world, Dr. Brennan can sometimes see things that others miss. You were smart to bring her out here. She'll see something or discover something that might otherwise be missed."

"Yeah." Danforth waited impatiently for the doors to finally open. When they did, he almost tried to push the door open, but settled for keeping it open longer. "Maybe. I don't imagine there's much intellectual stimulation waiting for Rip Van Winkle to awaken."

Sweets had an irrational desire to throttle the larger man, but he held steady and kept his eyes on the elevator control panel. He tried to compose a comeback about how the emergency instructions were more interesting than Danforth's insights, but he felt that was a stretch and held his comment.

The agent poked at the number of the floor where Mrs. Bancroft was scheduled to be and Sweets tried to keep his mind on the task at hand.

But it was hard. Dr. Brennan vied for his thoughts as did the comatose Booth. And little Christine. And Parker. And the Jeffersonian team that seemed forever linked to the fate of the Bs.

"We're here. Doc?"

Sweets shook himself and felt a sense of dread as he stepped out onto the floor. The nurses wore blue scrubs in various shades while the students, they'd been directed, would stand out in pale shades of yellow. Ashley Bancroft was standing with women dressed in a suit, her head bent over a clipboard.

"Mrs. Bancroft? May I have a minute of your time?" Danforth offered up a modicum of his gruff charm. "We think that we have a handle on what happened to your sister." He took Sweets in with his look. "Dr. Lance Sweets is here to help if you feel any distress, but I was wondering if you could help us understand some of the workings of the hospital."

Despite his protests, the man did understand how to elicit cooperation and Sweets joined in as they chatted as they made their way downstairs to one of the old surgeries on the first floor.

"Tom couldn't have hurt Lisa," Mrs. Bancroft was saying as they entered the old wing. "He certainly wasn't screwing her. I would know. A wife knows."

Sweets murmured something in agreement, the plan to build trust with Bancroft before springing their evidence on her. As they neared the surgery, they saw a flutter of activity outside the room—a trio of FBI techs were packing their cases.

Dr. Brennan and crew had been there at least an hour before he had arrived with Danforth.

Inside the anthropologist stood waiting for them.

"Ashley Bancroft, this is Dr. Temperance Brennan of the Jeffersonian," Danforth said. "She knows a thing or two about bones, specifically, the bone damage that was done to your sister."

"We found blood consistent with the sister's blood type," Dr. Brennan intoned.

"We get half a dozen gunshot victims, stabbing victims in here every Saturday night by 7. It could be anyone's blood."

Ashley Bancroft had picked a good place to stage the murder, Sweets thought. He could practically hear Caroline Julian pointing out how easy it would be for a defense attorney to dismantle their evidence.

"The protocol for cleaning this room of blood is fairly thorough," Dr. Brennan continued. "It's used mostly as an overflow room when the exam rooms are full."

Bancroft didn't miss a beat. "It's an old surgery. It's small and doesn't really have the room for all the machines and the surgical teams. . . ."

He listened to the explanation as he wandered the room. It was small and the machines that lined the walls made it even smaller. They were wrapped in clear plastic and had a patina of disuse about them. Dr. Brennan stood by the door as did Danforth.

"So a lot of blood flows through here," Danforth interrupted. "My people tell me that it's a straight shot to the incinerator chute from here. Pretty deserted, too. Older wing, not really up to today's standards but little money to upgrade." He snapped his fingers and pointed at Danforth. "That's what this was all about. Money. Lots of it."

"Money?" Bancroft put on her most innocent look. "My sister was killed for money?"

"Yes," Dr. Brennan said. "You killed her for money. You and your husband."

Sweets had seen many fine performances over the years, but Ashley Bancroft was playing her heart out for a shot at winning the Oscar for her starring role in her sister's demise.

"I loved my sister. Tom didn't hurt her. He was trying to save her. . . ."

"He killed her," Dr. Brennan said. "Probably with your help. You would know that freezing the body would retard decomposition, but more importantly, it would prevent insects associated with decomp from appearing on the body."

"Which would give you enough time for an alibi—a presentation in front of 100 or so nurses as part of a class project." Danforth cocked his head toward Dr. Brennan. "The floor plan of this part of the hospital has a service elevator right down the hallway toward the morgue."

"I don't have to listen to this," Bancroft was saying, "I didn't kill my sister. I didn't do what you say I did." She had stepped close to a gurney and her hands were thrust deep into the pockets of her scrubs. "I had no reason to kill her."

"But you did," Danforth said. "You were always paying for her good times. Her bad luck. Unemployment only goes so far." He punched the air. "Damn her. You were trying to do something with your life and she was doing anyone who came into her life. Including your husband."

Bancroft looked defiant still, but the façade was shifting.

Dr. Brennan held up an evidence bag. "You cleaned the room well, but bone chips can travel pretty far and can become part of the blood spatter." Sweets stepped closer and read the tag on it. "Bone fragment, right. . . ."

And that's as far as he got. The gurney was pushed hard into Danforth, causing the agent to lose his balance. Bancroft took several steps toward the door, but her surprise move was met with another.

All right, two others.

Seeing Danforth on the floor, surprised at being upended, Sweets pulled his gun and aimed it straight at Bancroft.

Then she disappeared.

Her lunge toward the door became more of a crashing collapse as Dr. Brennan's foot met her leg and the nursing student crashed headlong into the door.

Sweets followed, using his leg to catch the door and swing it open enough to follow her out even as he had to hip check the gurney out of his way.

But Bancroft had scrambled to her feet and was racing down the darkened hallway before disappearing into the shadows.

Without thinking, he started after her and found himself leading the pack, Dr. Brennan behind him while Danforth had found his legs and was bringing up the rear.

She hadn't gained much of a lead and he found himself with Dr. Brennan practically on his heels following Bancroft into a short hallway that led into another room.

And it was a mistake.

He raced into the room, crashing through the swinging doors only to feel something catch at his jacket then give way.

Whatever it was, his stomach burned and he stumbled backwards into Dr. Brennan.

"Sweets?"

His hand went to his stomach and he felt the burn and then the warm wetness and he had the sense of falling.

"Sweets?"

He held the gun in front of him even as he was falling to his knees and he called out, "Stop, FBI. Stop or I'll shoot."

A gunshot rang out, deafening him as he fell into something soft and safe. In front of him, somewhere in the distance, he heard a thud and a clatter of something metallic hit the ground.

"Did I hit her?" he asked as he felt his guts twisting and his side burning. He folded at the waist and he was grateful that Dr. Brennan was holding him steady because the ground was cold and hard and unforgiving beneath him.

"We need a medic," he heard as his guts seemed to pretzel twist at him. "We need a medic. Sweets has been injured."

He nodded at this news because it sounded right. A quick glance at his side told him that both his jacket and his shirt had been cut away and Dr. Brennan had wadded the fabric and was pressing it hard against him.

"Did I hit her?" he asked again. "I shot her, didn't I?"

He could vaguely see Danforth's silhouette in front of him hovering over something on the floor, but the pain rippling along his side twisted him into the spasms and he gasped for air.

"A doctor's on the way, Sweets," he heard Dr. Brennan's voice behind him. He had the sense that he was sitting on the floor with Dr. Brennan somehow wrapped around him, holding him upright. "Danforth's got her. She's not going anywhere."

He found himself like Booth's bobblehead, nodding dumbly at the news.

"I shot her," he gasped. "She was running and she did something to me and I heard the boom. . . ."

His side burned and Dr. Brennan was pressing into his side so hard that he thought that if she just let go it would feel so much better and he started to wriggle free of her, but she held him in an iron grip. Then Danforth was kneeling in front of him and someone in grey was kneeling in front of him and then was helping him lay down.

"Sweets, stay with me."

He grunted something and nodded dumbly and felt the pressure suddenly off his side and then something slick and warm oozing down his front and back and he wanted to tell them that it would stain his pants and he didn't mean to mess himself when in a waning moment of clarity, he wanted the answer to his question.

"Dr. Bones, did I stop her? I stopped her, didn't I?"

"No," he heard Dr. Brennan's voice as something pinched his arm and he felt himself drifting away from the moment into darkness, "Agent Danforth shot her."

**Thursday, 2:57 p.m.**

He eyed his watch as the hour narrowed down and began to tap his pen against the pad of paper in his lap.

". . . And I told her that it was my job." The agent looked to him for some kind of support, but Sweets ignored the cue and looked at his watch again.

"I'm dressing like that for a reason," the man continued, ignoring the obvious nonverbal cue from him, "high heels, push-up bra. . . ."

Sweets stilled the impulse to glance at his watch, and turned his pen to the pad to scribble a note. The stitches in his side itched fiercely under the protective gauze bandage.

". . . How was I supposed to know that I would like the feel of pantyhose or how those heels made my ass look?"

He fought the urge to check the time and the urge to draw a picture of the agent's newly-acquired wardrobe choices on the pad in front of him. Instead he jotted down a few terms straight from the American Psychiatric Associations' **Diagnostic and Treatment Manual**, circled these as well as the words, "homework assignment", and focused his attention on the agent.

"Agent Weston," he began, "maybe you need to talk to your wife openly and honestly about how you feel when you dress up as you do." He shifted in his seat. "You might even dress up for her gradually, let her see that it doesn't affect your sexuality but may, in fact, give you insights. . . ."

The words came automatically as if they had come straight from the bible of his profession, but he didn't pay that much attention. Agent Weston nodded solemnly, his body language clearly indicating he was open to his suggestions and he held on until the agent said his goodbyes and closed the door behind him before Sweets dove for his cell phone and re-read the text from Dr. Brennan.

"He's awake."

oOo

**Thursday, 4:37 p.m.**

Angela hugged him the moment he walked into the lounge and he gladly accepted the claps to his back and shoulder from Jared and Hodgins and the nod from Dr. Saroyan.

"You've seen him?" he asked. "He really is awake?"

The smiles and general air of relief said it all.

"Asked for a cheeseburger and a shake," Jared said. The younger Booth grinned. "Tempe practically clocked him, told him she didn't need to watch him have a heart attack, too."

Sweets couldn't help his own grin that easily chased away the gloom that had settled over him the last week.

"So what are we waiting on?" Sweets asked. "Can we go in to see him?"

"The doctors are with him," Hodgins offered. "They're just running a few tests and then we should be able to see him."

The lounge, so familiar and so gray these past few days, seemed almost brighter despite the waning day.

He glanced around the little family that had gathered there. Everyone had relaxed into smiles and laughter, the tension having been shed the moment they'd received the news.

_He's awake. _

_Finally._

That should be enough for now, but he knew that it really wasn't. There were questions yet to be answered, a future for their little crime-solving family still uncertain. And the psychologist in him, the part of him who felt responsible for the mental well-being of his friends, wanted to know the answers.

Before he could see Booth for himself or poll the others about what they wanted for their futures, the elevators whooshed open and he recognized the heavy footsteps heading toward them.

Agent Matthew Danforth actually seemed to be smiling as he approached them.

And he carried a vase full of flowers.

These he handed off to Dr. Saroyan as if they were nuclear waste and then pulled him aside.

"You healing? Doing all that doctor shit they have you do?"

He wanted to laugh, but he knew from a few close calls over the last couple of days that laughter only pulled at the stitches and caused them to itch more.

"Yeah, I'm following doctor's orders although I was back at work today."

Danforth grunted.

"The flowers are nice." Sweets pointed at the vase which had been assigned a spot on the coffee table amid the coffee cups littered there.

"Booth doesn't need them, but the ladies like them." Danforth straightened and gestured in the general direction of Booth's room. "He's still got weeks of healing and rehab before he's officially back on the job."

"And you want to know if Dr. Brennan has changed her mind and will work with the FBI still."

He'd already had a conversation with Hacker about the possibility of keeping the Jeffersonian and FBI partnership alive, but he had no real answers for his boss.

"You got me, Doc." Danforth looked uncomfortable. "She handled herself well and she kept you from spilling your guts all over the shiny floors at the hospital."

"I handled myself well, too."

It had taken some time and some soul searching, but he had come to that conclusion on his own. He'd done his best—something Booth had always asked of him—and he had helped solve the case without jeopardizing anyone's safety except his own.

Danforth said nothing.

"C'mon," he repeated, "I did pretty well for myself. If I was going to get injured, a hospital is a pretty good place to get hurt."

It had been the joke of the week and he had taken the teasing good-naturedly. Booth and Brennan had been injured several times over the years and he'd seen other agents face down their own injuries. He saw it as a rite of passage. "When you're dealing with life and death," one of the agents had told him, "life's always sweeter when you come out on the alive side."

"Doc," Danforth began as he watched the interplay between the Hodgins and the others, "there's no good place to get hurt. This job has a habit of leaving all kinds of hurts and the trick is to avoid leaving too much scar tissue. That just acts as a reminder."

Sweets studied the man as Danforth studied Booth's odd, extended family.

"Your bone lady's got a lot of scar tissue," he murmured and Sweets found himself leaning in to hear him.

But he said nothing more.

"After they kick us out of here," Sweets said, "we're going to the Founding Fathers to hoist a few. I'd like you to come."

Danforth grimaced and shook his head. "I'm allergic, Doc. Bars don't agree with me."

"Angela's still nursing and I'm on paid meds so you wouldn't be the only one not drinking." Sweets wanted the man's company suddenly. "Jared's been sober for a while now and if we get Dr. Brennan. . . ."

He felt Danforth's hand on his arm.

"Look, Dr. Sweets, I appreciate what you think you're doing, but you don't have to."

"I know."

Danforth took a deep breath and seemed to be building toward something. "I came here to pay my respects, see if I could talk to you for a bit. Give you some advice."

Sweets nodded. "Sure."

Just then Dr. Brennan emerged from somewhere down the hall and he practically could feel the surge of relief and happiness from where he was standing.

"She sure is pretty when she smiles," Danforth said. "This job doesn't lend itself to much of that."

The pain and sadness that Dr. Brennan had worn over the past several days had evaporated and Sweets had to admit that she was quite beautiful without those grey veils.

"You were asked to work with the Jeffersonian, weren't you?" Sweets had heard the scuttlebutt in the office. "Hacker thinks you could fill in for Booth until he returns."

Danforth chuckled. "Despite what people tell you and what you might see, people aren't interchangeable parts. Your crew proves that. Sometimes you've got a one-of-a-kind sports car; take something away and all it is is some damned piece of junk."

"You don't want to be the substitute teacher? Think we'll just give you crap?"

Jared and Dr. Saroyan and Angela and Hodgins were disappearing down the hallway in the direction of Booth's room. Dr. Brennan stood at the juncture between the lounge and the hall and was gesturing toward them.

For a long, long moment, Dr. Brennan and Danforth seemed to be studying each other, sizing up the other. Then in a long, slow turn, Dr. Brennan made her own way back toward Booth's room.

Sweets waited. Danforth had kept his word, kept everyone apprised of the Bancroft's confessions and of how the Jeffersonian was earning the majority of the credit for cracking the case wide open—exposing murderers and smugglers and liars alike. Caroline Julian had practically been giddy as she outlined the charges to be leveled against the players.

"You wanted to give me some advice?"

Danforth seemed lost in some kind of thought, but he gave a slow nod. "You are a good man, a good psychologist, a good friend. You have a good, good heart."

"That's the thing. Some people have the killer gene, Doc; they can adjust to what they've done. They know how to hold that sadness at bay when it creeps up on them."

Danforth turned toward him, his face tired and worn. "You're a lot of things, Dr. Sweets. But you just aren't a killer."

**A NOTE: I thank you for reading. It's been nice to read reviews in which readers have said, "I don't like Sweets but. . . " they've read the story anyway. I never considered Sweets' popularity; I just had a story I thought might be entertaining. I appreciate the reviews and in the next several days I intend to respond to them. **

**I set out to deal with the fact that they armed Sweets. I just don't see that he'll deal well with shooting someone, even if it is to save someone's life. **

**I'm heading back into Brennan and Booth territory—something angsty probably. It's already begun, waiting on this exercise in torture to run its course before I focus on it. **

**Originally this was going to be doled out in smaller clips, but given the facts that Sweets isn't terribly popular, I like longer chapters myself (I hate short chapters and long waits in between), and most of the story was written, I gave up that plan. I don't want to be whiny, but it can be very disheartening to write something you think is pretty good only to have a handful of reviews and a small number of readers. I guess I should write more fluff or smut or figure out what readers really want. Maybe it's a style thing. But in the meantime, I'll crank out my stories—they are, after all, some of the things I would like to read. **


	8. Epilog

**Author's Note:** _I always imagined Brennan working a case in which she is lowered to a crime scene and is hovering over it examining remain headfirst. While I don't like endings that linger too long, I just had to do this. It amuses me and it fits the story. Enjoy._

oOo

He really walked in on it.

Angela's monitors were huge—beautiful large screen tributes to engineering perfection—and right now they were the perfect vehicle for seeing what he was seeing.

He sure as hell wasn't sure he'd want to be there on site.

The winding mountain roads of the Appalachians often provided enough thrills just navigating them, but today they were the scene of something he wasn't sure any of them would see again.

Booth and Brennan together in the field.

Two months after being shot, Booth was back, the camera on him showing just how back he was.

"Is that Hodgins on the camera?" he asked.

Angela nodded. Dr. Saroyan just stared at the monitor, unblinking, the next image frightening—so frightening, that they all recoiled as if a unit, the image daring and thrilling and breathtaking all at once. Hodgins somehow pointed the camera downward, into the gorge and they could at once see the height and the depth and the fearfulness of what was about to happen.

The camera swung around on Dr. Brennan.

"How'd he get that shot?" he asked belatedly.

Both Angela and Dr. Saroyan answered together, "Tripod."

"Series 5000 articulating tripod with a full swiveling pan head," Angela added. "Jack likes his toys."

They continued to watch the scene unfolding. Dr. Brennan was being strapped into a harness, a local sheriff's deputy helping her step into the webbing. As he buckled her in, cinching up the slack, Booth took his place, testing each connection with a strong tug that practically ripped his partner from her feet.

"How'd they find it?"

"Hikers," supplied Dr. Saroyan.

"She really going to go down there?"

No one answered because no one needed to. Dressed in her Jeffersonian field jumpsuit, strapped into the harness, someone was now attaching a heavy cable to a thick D ring at her back and another to was threaded through one on the front. These, too, Booth tugged, the tension clearly evident in his face.

The only one who seemed calm in the sea of people was Dr. Brennan.

A remote area of the Appalachians had claimed a car and its passengers years ago, so the story went, and only now had someone spotted it, dangling precipitously from a sheared-off tree and a ledge of rock and the only way to it and the passengers was to be dangling from a crane that had been brought up to a clearing there. Most of the equipment up there, as well as the people, had been brought up piece by piece in an agonizingly slow process that had taxed man and machine.

"Why can't they just hook the car on a cable and hoist it up," he asked, "you know, crank it up and then take a look?"

"They're not sure if the structural integrity of the car can take the strain." The voice burbled with excitement. "Besides, even if the crane can take the load, this rock shelf may not."

"That's Hodgins," Sweets exclaimed. "He can hear us."

Angela nodded dumbly and continued to stare, wide-eyed at the scene.

"Why didn't they just drop a camera over the edge of that and see if it contains human remains?"

He spoke up, directing his question to Hodgins.

"Camera resolution showed skeletonized remains but the resolution wasn't good enough to give them cause of death or even to tell them how many remains were on board." The voice was patient and calm, a teaching moment of sorts. "Have to send someone down to take a look."

Hodgins voice came over the speakers hushed and whispery like a golf tournament announcer's voice.

"She's really going to do this," Sweets said to no one in particular.

The scene on screen gave them the answer. Someone was fitting an odd headpiece at her temple and as he watched he realized it was a camera. A technician was off to the side and Hodgins panned over to show a monitor that blinked to life, the image darting with Dr. Brennan's head as she twisted and turned as she strapped on an equipment belt and checked its contents.

"You'd think we'd be doing this for a crown prince of Europe or to settle some geopolitical argument in some small, but very important Arab emirate, but no, this is all because a family went out for a Sunday drive in their car. . . ."

"Sweets!"

"Dr. Sweets!"

His own nervousness had unleashed his restraint and he had been pouring out his thoughts until the women beside him halted the flood of words.

"Two adults. Bank robbers disappeared out there fifteen, twenty years ago." Dr. Saroyan paused, her own eyes never darting from the screen. "It would be nice to know if this is them."

He tried to take a breath and calm his heart that seemed to be beating a bass drum in his ears when he tore his eyes away from the screen. Scanning the room, he tried to find something else to look at, anything rather than the scene in front of him when he came upon a blown-up image of the car off to the side on one of the sign boards they sometimes used for such things. The mangled car body looked like little more than a wad of paper crumpled and abandoned on the ledge.

"How can anyone tell what make that is?" he asked as he leaned in to the picture and tried to read the numbers.

"They can't," Hodgins said from his perch hundreds of miles away. "It's so badly rusted that it almost blended into the foliage and the iron oxide content leaching out of the soil. Most remains are thought to be consumed by scavengers or carried off and most have been accounted for over the years except for our one family."

He watched the story unfold. The people around Dr. Brennan stepped away and she stepped forward and Booth held her by the waist and they could all hear the muffled last minute instructions from her partner, the unspoken instructions were there as well—be careful. Come back to me.

It was the ultimate high-wire act. Booth stepped back and signaled the crane operator and she was lifted from the ground and began a slow horizontal arc from the edges of stone to dangle directly over the void before being lowered from view.

Hodgins followed her descent until he couldn't and for one frightening moment they saw only static as they were switched from his view to hers.

They were looking out into the sky for a moment before a blur of rocks and brush and dirt entered their view.

"Sweetie, can you hear me?"

"Yes," came the breathy reply. "Booth?"

His reply completed the circuit.

"We need to lower you almost twelve feet," Hodgins said.

There was a steady show of plants braving the rock face and sometimes the dizzying view of the tops of trees below whenever Dr. Brennan looked downward.

"Could you stop doing that, Bren?"

"Doing what?"

"Looking down."

"Why?"

"Vertigo."

Sweets looked over and saw what Angela was seeing—Dr. Saroyan was wrapped in on herself, her eyes shut, her hand to her mouth.

"I have to look down, Angela. I need to assess where the car is and if there are any hazards. . . ."

"No, no, it's all right," Dr. Saroyan said, her voice unusually high. "Just let me know when you get to the car."

Exchanging a glance with Angela, Sweets turned back toward the monitor. Now two images appeared: one looking down on Dr. Brennan's descent as well as her more intimate view.

It was the best of both worlds.

"You could try breathing slower. . . ," he suggested, beginning his demonstration by exaggerating the technique.

"No, no, that's fine," Dr. Saroyan said. Her eyes were still tightly closed. "Just tell me when she's there."

It was a coping mechanism that seemed to be working. Her breathing was a bit fast, but her color was normal and, well, the better show was on the monitor. With another assessing look, he turned back to the screen.

The car was just coming into view, its cloth top tattered and shredded by the elements.

He could hear Booth in the background ordering someone to do a search, then his voice became more direct. "Talk to me, Bones."

She was running through what she saw on the vehicle and Sweets could imagine one of the junior agents on scene scrambling to relay the information to another agent online.

"I'm ready to go down," Dr. Brennan announced.

The bodies in the car were darkened, leathery creatures with their death grins facing upward. Hanging midair from the cable like a spider on a single filament, she continued with her observations.

She paused after describing the second victim and Booth took the opportunity to ask, "Are you done, Bones? Can we pull you up?"

The silence earned another evoking of her nickname.

"Booth, this is a crime scene."

The sigh from Booth was unmistakable.

"Gunshot wound to the back of the skull. Female passenger. The male driver also has gun shot wounds. One. . . two. Neck and chest. And another one at the top of the skull."

"The car's also been shot."

Sweets stood and listened as Booth outlined what may have happened. "They were on the run, being chased. . . ."

And so it began. Weeks ago Booth was little more than a question mark and Dr. Brennan had sworn off working cases and here they were, back again.

Sweets couldn't help but smile.

But it seemed wrong.

And oh, so right.

A cell phone rang and Booth answered. The audio feed garbled the conversation, but not the tail end of it. "Hey, Bones. Mrs. Drummer from the day care wants to know if you have another bottle of milk, you know, for our short stuff. Your office?"

"Where would I keep it in my office, Booth?"

"Well, the Jeffersonian kitchen. Do you have another bottle there?"

"No, Booth. I told you we needed to drop off an extra bottle."

"Well, that's not helping, Bones. The baby's hungry now."

"Angela, do you have any milk?"

"No, Bones. That won't be necessary. . . ."

"It's just breast milk, Booth. As long as the mother. . . ."

"They can use a formula or something. . . ."

"Well, Angela can supply the milk. . . ."

"I'll tell Mrs. Drummer that she should use the formula. . . ."

"Studies have shown that a woman who is lactating can produce 16 ounces. . . ."

"Formula, Bones. One day of formula is not going to hurt the baby. . . ."

"I would nurse Michael if Angela couldn't. . . ."

Booth wouldn't have any of it. "Mrs. Drummer? We don't. . . just give our precious one some formula. . . we'll be a little late. I'll call Max to pick her up. We've got plenty of milk at home. . . .Yes. . . . Good-bye, Mrs. Drummer. G'bye."

Sweets couldn't help smiling. Two months ago this might not. . . no. The past informs the present and the present forms the future and he knew his part in the present. As he had told Booth and Brennan a while back, the past doesn't have to keep the present hostage.

He was sure they understood even if they played it off as if they didn't.

It was typical Booth and Brennan.

But he kept smiling.

"Sweets," Angela looked up from her remote pad, "are you all right?"

"Yeah," he said, his eyes never quite leaving the images on the screen, "yeah they are."


End file.
